Dance: Much pride in remarkable offerings

By LINDA HERRICK

The Royal New Zealand Ballet celebrated its 50th birthday this year and confirmed its status as a troupe with an astonishing range of talent by staging wildly divergent productions. March saw a programme which showed off artistic director Gary Harris' astute judgment, in a bill boasting the classic Paquita Variations, FrENZy and Melting Moments, both choreographed by Mark Baldwin, and the premiere of Javier De Frutos's new Milagros.

The company was back again in June with Romeo and Juliet, choreographed by Christopher Hampson, with ugly fight scenes, clever techniques to contrast the two worlds of the two warring clans, convincing characterisation, and an overall tragic effect felt by our reviewer, Bernadette Rae, to possess "explosive, lithe and lyrical excellence".

Peter Pan was an entirely charming way for the RNZB to end the year, with Tinker Bell flying through the air with the greatest of ease and veteran Jon Trimmer enjoying himself enormously as Captain Hook. With the RNZB set to tour England next year, we have so much to be proud of in this little company that could.

The richness of contemporary dance in this country was also confirmed with longtime choreographer and arts laureate Shona McCullagh being given a $65,000 Creative NZ Fellowship, her first "wage" since 1988. She is worth every cent.

Another person who has proven long-term commitment to dance is Black Grace founder Neil Ieremia, who showed his dark side in a new work called Surface, inspired by the tattoo, the pe'a. It looked Samoan, it sounded Samoan, but Rae also believed it spoke of an inner crisis that expressed complexity "and a portent of passion".

Black Grace's junior branch, Urban Youth Movement, developed as part of an access programme partnered by The Edge and Ieremia, returned with Escape ... Again, a potent expression of young kids' pains and concerns, a process that was scary and emotional for them - and for the audience, too.

Lemi Ponifasio and his Mau dance company came back to haunt us with Paradise. It was strange and powerful; "Just be glad it is Paradise under Ponifasio's microscope and not his purgatory," said Rae.

Maori dance artists also continue to grow, with artistic director Stephen Bradshaw, who established Labour Department work skills initiative dance groups in the 80s, back with the Atamira Dance Collective and a season of exciting works called Mauri, "life essence". Bradshaw has a choreographic strategy which will see new Maori contemporary dance produced each year and it will be interesting to see what comes out of that.

Overseas dance groups dropped in, such as the Taipei Ballet's staging of The Lady of the Camellias, which revealed an Asian company struggling to get to grips with Western dance, and the Sydney Dance Company's fabulous production of Graeme Murphy's Ellipse.

Both came under the umbrella of the inaugural AK03 festival, which also included Raewyn Hill's deeply moving When Love Comes Calling.

But AK03 cast a long shadow over the city's annual dance festival, tempo, which came the following month to an audience pretty much festivalled-out. That was a shame, as was AK03's apparent refusal to accommodate tempo into its lineup.

But all in all, it's been a stimulating and encouraging year for dance. My personal favourite was Touch Compass' four-work programme featuring Catherine Chappell's Grace, the short dance film Timeless, Moss Patterson's Manawa, the humour of Philip Patson, and the terrific, brave filmic pairing of one-legged Tim Turner and three-legged dog Boiski who later enjoyed a post-performance wander through the Maidment. What a wag.