Parmenter moves in new direction

Michael Parmenter wants to use the grant to turn his work in a new direction. Picture / Herald file

Time and money are two things choreographer Michael Parmenter reckons he never has enough of. Sure, he's had substantial funding through his 25-year career as a dancer and choreographer.

As he says himself, if you added it all up, and assumed much of the money had gone to him, personally, he should be driving a Mercedes. But no. A sad 1974 Capri sits on his front lawn, the weeds pushing up around the wheels. He can't afford to get its warrant of fitness and uses a cycle to get around town instead.

Maybe his Capri will get some mechanical upgrading over the next year, when Parmenter will have $65,000 to play with thanks to a Creative New Zealand Choreographic Fellowship. But the money is for dance, not the car - the story of his life, really. The grant will support his goal of researching a major new dance he hopes to stage in early 2007.

The piece - working title The Arkaeology - will be made in collaboration with designer John Verryt and composer Eden Mulholland. The money and the year to do the research are hard-won luxuries. In major American and European dance companies, time to develop a new work is a given. Here, you usually get six or seven weeks.

"One of the things I struggle most with is the way it is pressurised in terms of the time you have to prepare for a dance work," he says. "In countries where dance companies work 9-12 months of the year, they will work on accumulating material and research work for the next piece.

"Here, we work on a pick-up basis. You have the dancers for seven weeks, eight if you are lucky, to produce a work and at the end of the process, you have this work that's going on stage. You need to do a lot of work beforehand yourself. Sometimes I go into the studio and create a whole lot of the material which I will learn or video but really the piece only starts when you have the dancers to work with."

Parmenter wants to use the grant to turn his work in a new direction, away from the narrative drive of some of his most gorgeous and memorable pieces, like Jerusalem, Tristan & Isolde, Dark Forest, or the cumulative force of his stunning retrospective Commotion, which toured earlier this year.

"Those were big narrative pieces but when I started work as a choreographer I spent a lot of time doing much more exploratory work in the studio, then turning that into abstract works where movement itself was the subject," he explains.

"I want to bring those together. The way I did that in the past was by finding music as a narrative structure, then researching the movement to fit within that. This time, I want to start just with the body, then see what sort of character or narrative structures emerge out of that.

"Rather than beginning with my characters, my story, my musical structure, then finding the movement, I want to go the other way around."

This way of thinking marries with research Parmenter plans for the masters degree in philosophy and dance he has started at the University of Auckland, into how "meaning structures" arise out of movement.

The title Arkaeology relates to man's connection to other species, like animals, in terms of movement.

"We are movers before we are speakers and as a species, evolution-wise, movement is the first means of understanding the world. One of the cultural universalities of the body is that we move towards things that attract us and away from things we fear."

Parmenter, who turned 50 this year and has been "contending with HIV over the years", is always observing changes in his own body. "I have noticed in the past few months where I am doing academic work and teaching at Unitec, but not doing a lot of dancing, that my body has changed. I am riding my bike to university and my thighs have got bigger and my upper body smaller.

"With HIV, I have also charted periods when my body was feeling a little bit vulnerable so yeah, there are lots of changing cycles. Generally though I have found ways of being a lot more easy with my body as I've got older but I still explore a wide range of movement in the way a lot of dancers my age don't do."

Parmenter says the new work will not be epic in scale - Commotion featured 18 dancers - but will employ up to 10 dancers. "Rather than bringing dancers back from overseas, I want to start to work with younger dancers. Given the fact I'm working through a longer period of time, maybe it is time to start to bring on the younger dancers, see if they can get some of the experience they need here in New Zealand."

With a grin, he adds, "I do have a paternalistic response to some of the younger dancers, especially some of those who I have had a hand in training. I love to see them confirming my faith but also challenging me by doing work that is so radically different from what I do. They are not little parrots."