The Wedding at Aotea Centre

From left, part of The Wedding's team: dramaturge Raymond Hawthorne, lead ballerina Lucy Balfour and Choreographer Mark Baldwin. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

The handsome leading man, Brad, bridegroom-to-be, is something of an anti-hero, announces Raymond Hawthorne, dramaturge for the Royal New Zealand Ballet's cracking new work The Wedding.

"Brad," he says dryly, "has problems with his down-belows."

He unravels the plot a little more.

A sexually-incontinent womaniser, Brad is still the toast of Auckland society - though his Paratai Dr-residing, Italian future father-in-law seems to be getting his number, and is not so keen on the wedding.

Then the courier, who delivers flowers from Brad for bride-to-be Angie turns out to be her high school crush, Charles. He turns up again, at Angie's hens night celebrations: as a stripper.

Confusion flutters in Angie's loins, doubt bedevils her heart. While Brad, star player, heads off to the rugby club for a pre-nuptial game ...

It doesn't come more Kiwi-contemporary than that, and it has to be the most daringly different theme the Royal New Zealand Ballet has ever adopted for a classical work. In spite of the modern sociological setting, The Wedding is still a work of pure ballet, with one of the world's leading contemporary choreographers heading the creative team.

It has been a huge undertaking for the company, a project two years in the making, and one which will premiere, in a break with long tradition, in Auckland, rather than Wellington, tomorrow night.

Maoridom's literary man of the moment Witi Ihimaera has provided the story. Mark Baldwin, Fiji-born but raised in Auckland, a founding member of Limbs and now artistic director of Britain's award winning Rambert Dance Company, has been prised away from London to choreograph. Gareth Farr has written the highly customised score. Talented Tracy Grant, another Aucklander, is set and costume designer, with John Rayment on lighting. And in another near-first for ballet making, Hawthorne was appointed dramaturge, a theatrical convention with the role of keeping the story in focus at all times, so the audience gets each and every nuance.

Ballet's narrative is most often something that happens in the programme notes. But The Wedding promises to be very different.

"My choreography tends to be more esoteric," says Baldwin, who began creating the steps for The Wedding months ago, clad only in his underpants in the privacy of his living room, and has the video to prove it.

"Raymond has made me change things all the way through. Usually small things, but important - like where dancers might enter the stage, for example.

"I have never worked with a dramaturge before. It was one of the attractions of doing this work - alongside the fact that it is the chance to create a completely new full-length work, with a composer, one of the world's finest writers, and a seriously good designer."

Hawthorne, like Ihimaera, is a newcomer to the art of creating dance, but both profess a lifelong interest and love of the medium. Ihimaera was commissioned to provide a plot.

"Witi wanted me appointed as dramaturge," Hawthorne says. "He got badly bitten over the musical of Whale Rider and didn't want that to happen again."

So for the first three weeks of the eight-week rehearsal period, and again in the last two weeks when the company moved to Auckland to complete their preparations, Hawthorne has been at work, bounding about the studio with directions, filling the air with his vibrant, theatrically rather blue, language.

"It's going to be fabulous," he says. "And not just because I have been working on it."

Hawthorne remembers Baldwin performing in Limbs "a hundred years ago" and has been "pleased and honoured" to work alongside him. He admires him for his return to put something back into New Zealand.

"His work is very classical, the lifts, the lyricism, it is all there. He has created some beautiful duets, it is a very aesthetic piece of work. But he can also show a contemporary bent, which I register with very strongly."

And although Farr's score, his first for ballet, has been in the making for over a year, he too has been a presence in rehearsals, often rewriting sections in a matter of days.

"It has been completely ensemble - exactly my cup of tea," says Hawthorne.

"It is what I have loved the most. That and the sheer hard work of the dancers. I have never seen such hard work - sweat dripping, no one pulling back, the senior dancers quietly leading the way, though they do that quite unconsciously.

"These dancers push their bodies, and push so far. I find it wonderful and very moving."

When:  Mar 1-5, 7.30pm & Sun matinee 2.30pm