Auckland artist and illustrator Ant Sang in his home studio. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
Auckland artist and illustrator Ant Sang in his home studio. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
THE VIEW FROM MY WINDOW
Auckland illustrator Ant Sang on The Art of Black Grace 1/5 and trying to get inside creator Neil Ieremia’s head.
People think of me as an animator, because I was [lead designer] on bro’Town, but I worked on the character designs for that. I didn’thave anything at all to do with the actual animation process. So this was a challenge. But the real challenge was working out a way to translate what Neil [the founder and artistic director of dance company Black Grace] had in his head into imagery I could draw.
Live performances had been basically cancelled with all the Covid restrictions and lockdowns, so Neil was trying to find new ways to present his work. He came up with the idea of a film presentation but in a unique set-up, using a ginormous 360-degree screen that wraps around the audience and is 6m high. It’ll be quite the experience.
The Art of Black Grace 1/5 is an autobiographical story that skims through different parts of Neil’s life. One segment has a lot of archival photos and videos, including pictures from his family album and news footage of Bastion Point and the Rainbow Warrior bombing — a snapshot of the things that helped shape who he is and how he sees the world.
It sounded like a bit of a hard childhood in some ways, growing up in Cannons Creek [in Porirua], but also full of adventures. He talked about seeing gang guys around the neighbourhood — “gangsters”, he called them — and about when he first started pursuing dance and becoming interested in ballet. What I realised working with Neil is that he’s a real artist. He had such a clear vision; the segments of the story were already fully formed in his mind.
The character I’ve created is modelled on Neil’s 17-year-old son, Isaac, who you see later as an actor in the dance videos. We nicknamed him Astro Boy. The sequences are quite fantastical. At one stage, he’s flying through space and as he zooms through the stars there’s a big explosion and he tumbles up close to the camera.
Then it morphs into an underwater scene spliced together with the dance performances that gradually unfold around you. All this is happening in a dynamic 360-degree screen environment. So Astro Boy will be flying at you and then past you and then behind you. The audience is having to look around constantly and what one person sees may not be what someone else sees.
Auckland artist Ant Sang modelled the character he nicknamed "Astro Boy" on Black Grace founder and artistic director Neil Ieremia's son, Isaac.
An immersive digital dance experience, The Art of Black Grace 1/5 features projections that surround the audience on a 360-degree screen that's 6m high.
For me, drawing still feels a lot more natural when I’m working with a pencil and paper. The ideas flow more freely, so I always start off a new project that way. I’d send rough sketches to Neil and then we’d go back and forth to slowly narrowit down to the final design. Because I don’t have animation training, we figured out a way of using the drawings as part animation and part what I would describe as digital illustration, with images that appear and then pause, creating quite a stilted look.
I still have some of my really early drawings from when I was about 9 or 10 and it’s interesting to see them now because they’re an attempt at doing comics but they’re still very much cartoons. I’d draw a scene on a big piece of paper, with lots of speech bubbles and sound effects, and it was meant to tell a story, but it wasn’t split up into panels. So it was just one image with a hell of a lot going on.
As a kid, I watched cartoons on TV — Hong Kong Phooey and Mr. Magoo — and we always had a lot of comics in the house. Richie Rich, Donald Duck... the funnies. I’ve never really been a superhero fan. It’s just not a genre that interests me.
— As told to Joanna Wane
The Art of Black Grace 1/5 opens tomorrow at Karanga Plaza in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter and is on until December 10, with sessions running every half-hour (see blackgrace.co.nz). Sang’s illustrations also feature in a new children’s book, 4 Yaks and a Yeti, written by mountaineer Peter Hillary.
