Desperately seeking a sense of place

By BERNADETTE RAE

Who is this Queen Camel who lends her name to the new contemporary dance work from choreographer Ann Dewey? (And yes it is "camel", as in large, desert-dwelling quadruped, and not "cam-mel" as some are preferring to say.)

"Aha," says Dewey, small and blonde, English-born, world-travelled, a favourite dancer of Douglas Wright, especially in Forever. "That is the question."

Queen Camel is not the name of a person, but of a village near a hill in England, called Camelot, and thought to be the site of Camelot - the Camelot of myth and magic and holy grails. Dewey's guru, Mata Yogananda, has a meditation centre there.

"And it is a name that begs the question," says Dewey, "of who am I? What is my identity? Where is my sense of place?"

Dewey and company performed in the hall of the Queen Camel meditation centre when they toured her previous work, Nine Daisies, last year. That work was designed to be performed in gardens large and small, private, public, grand or ordinary. But in Queen Camel it was performed in a hall, with a little stage and peculiar lighting, and the performance got slightly out of hand - the company felt disoriented, displaced.

The name stuck, as a title for a new work that was already in Dewey's head, about immigration and refugees, of people being displaced in their lives.

Dewey had become a New Zealand citizen in 2001, after living here for 13 years, and wider issues of immigration can hardly be ignored in the daily dialogue.

"So I look at all that in my Queen Camel," she says, "in a funny, abstract way. I find metaphors for the mental, physical and emotional isolation, for the strangeness of arriving somewhere new and for the feeling of being overawed by a new place. And there are quite a few veiled references to Queen Camel."

Dewey's past work has been noted for its lyricism, with a fast and rhythmic element in counterpoint.

She says there is a lot of humour in Queen Camel as well, some dance theatre movements and a flirtation with the hysterical.

The work is set to an original score from John Gibson; he and Dewey worked in close collaboration to produce movement and music that speaks of the immigration experience.

Dewey is familiar with the feelings that accompany moving homes: her father was a geologist and the family was constantly relocating around the globe. She has spent almost equal portions of her life, so far, in England, America and New Zealand. She danced children's roles, as a girl, in performances by the New York City Ballet, went to the National School of Ballet in Toronto at 13, and made the connection with contemporary dance at the Rambert Academy in London, later performing with Ballet Rambert, the touring company Janet Smith & Dancers and DV8 Physical Theatre, before coming to New Zealand and working with Douglas Wright, Michael Parmenter and Shona McCullagh.

She reckons she knows as well as anybody the difficulties of immigration.

"Unless you have experienced it you have no idea what it is like," she says. "It can be very difficult but it can also be very freeing. You can go into a state of heightened consciousness, just being in a place that is different."

Queen Camel looks at both ends of the experience and comes up with a surprise ending that also contains a resolution.

Queen Camel plays at the Concert Chamber in the Town Hall, a significant venue, says Dewey, because many new New Zealanders take their oath of citizenship there.

Performance

* What: Queen Camel

* Where: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber

* When: tonight until Saturday