Grant helps artist find her feet once more

By BERNADETTE RAE

Dancemaker Shona McCullagh indisputably ranks among the top three choreographers in the country, rubbing collegial shoulders with Douglas Wright and expat Michael Parmenter. Last year she was named a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate.

She has staged a series of unforgettable full-length productions: Flare Up, with the band Six Volts, the beautiful Mad Angels and Quick. She once made a short work about compost, called Thriving Decay. It was meaningful, zany - much like the articulate McCullagh herself.

She has gained an international reputation with her acclaimed award-winning dance films, Hurtle and fly.

Yet the inaugural $65,000 Creative New Zealand Choreographic Fellowship bestowed upon her last week will provide her with a wage for the first time since 1988, when she left Limbs Dance Company. And it will give her adequate time and resources to investigate new directions, to research and develop a live work "with global potential" for the first time in her career.

McCullagh is pleased not only for herself, but for the dance sector.

"It accords a sense of value, visibility and achievement to people who have devoted their lives to an art form that is traditionally treacherous financially, haphazard structurally and critically terrifying," she says.

Visual art represents an investment for the buyer, but live work cannot be hung on a wall or contained or have a value placed on it, except in our memories and opinions, she says.

"The ethereal nature of their work makes it easy for choreographers to feel invisible and isolated."

The fellowship, and the $15,000 residency announced alongside, mark a coming of age in New Zealand's recognition of mid-career and senior dance artists, she says, and represent an "injection of health" into a community that is clearly ailing and in need of initiatives, infrastructure and support. In addition, Dunedin choreographer Daniel Belton won the residency at the University of Otago.

The feisty and talented McCullagh graduated from the New Zealand School of Dance in 1983. By January 1984 she had been accepted into the biannual choreographic Gulbenkian Course in Melbourne - to be inspired by British choreographer Glen Tetley - and then invited to join the Sydney-based contemporary dance company Darc Swan, by its founder Chris Jannides, now head of dance at Unitec.

"There I was, after living in Wellington all my life, suddenly anonymous in a new city, spreading my wings and soaking up a different culture."

One year later she was offered a job in Limbs.

"I was sad to leave Chris," she says, "but all my teenage years I had wanted to join Limbs. Limbs had been my benchmark, my goal. I thought Kilda Northcott was a goddess. It was literally my dream come true."

In Limbs she revelled in working with choreographers such as John McGlachlan, Mary Jane O'Reilly, Brian Carbee and Douglas Wright, and basked in the skilled encouragement of Limbs manager Sue Paterson, now general manager of the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

"I was blessed to work in Limbs for three years: class every day, gleaning skills from more senior dancers, being invited to choreograph - and having a studio, a dance floor, a sound system and dancers and technical direction at my fingertips. That experience, in a permanent company, no matter what anybody says, is the best possible climate to develop young dancers and dance makers."

She left after three years, before Limbs folded, to join the Douglas Wright Dance Company, back in Wellington. "By then I was ready for project work."

She went to Europe in 1989 to attend Tanzwochen, a summer school for professional dancers in Vienna, and afterwards, with partner, musician John Gibson, tripped through Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Italy and Britain in a van.

She returned home not only pregnant but also committed to a huge collaboration with a Hungarian dance troupe called Artus. She remembers the months that followed as "a black time", in which she was increasingly unsure of her connection with the Hungarians, and desperately wanting to spend time with her new son, Arlo.

But the production had to go ahead. It was, in her own judgment, "a hideous flop".

But lots of choreographic commissions and teaching followed, and she made the gorgeous and successful Mad Angels in 1995, which she revived for a return season literally on the eve of the birth of her daughter, four years ago. In 1999 she also made Quick, a work integrating film and dance about her grandfather, commissioned by the International Festival.

Quick was hugely successful in Wellington and was given a standing ovation, says McCullagh, on opening night in Auckland. But the Auckland review was distinctly unfavourable and the audiences stayed away.

"Auckland is a difficult city, hard on its artists. And the audience is fickle."

The experience burned McCullagh's fingers badly. She lost $10,000 and vowed never to put her family through that again.

"I know it was a good show," she says. "But that is when I stopped self-producing. I just couldn't stomach it any longer. Since then I have made the dance films, which I love. But my live choreographic career has virtually been on hold, apart from short commissions for tertiary institutions. This means I haven't worked with professional dancers since 1999."

McCullagh is now 41 and full of plans.

She is off to Liverpool next week for an interactive workshop, then to the 25th anniversary Dance Umbrella Festival in London, and for the International Dance on Screen festivities, where her films have screened.

She has a third dance film in the pipeline, with friend and fellow dancer Ursula Robb, who is based in Europe, and another commission from the RNZB for 2005.

She is the voluntary chairperson of Auckland's imminent Festival of Dance, tempo*, an event she has vowed to grow into the leading dance festival in Australasia.

"Festivals like AK03 and tempo* are fantastic initiatives for harnessing audiences and providing a vital marketing support for artists."

Her fellowship project sounds fascinating: a multi-media project that will bring artistic investigation into line with scientific research, and that will integrate "the astral and the earthly". She will study quantum physics and collaborate with university physicists, computer scientists, architects - and psychologists - as well as workshop with dancers and digital artists, she says.

"And all going well I will have something from that to present at the 2006 International Festival. The fellowship has encouraged me to get back on the horse."