Strong views behind the classic fairytales

By BERNADETTE RAE

Creative New Zealand? Who needs it? So says choreographer Paul Jenden who has walked his talk, producing shows for eight years without a skerrick of government subsidy.

Jenden, a founder of Impulse Dance Company, has choreographed works for the Royal New Zealand Ballet (Le Papillon), Limbs, the New Zealand School of Dance and Dance South. He has long held strong views on arts funding.

If audiences and sponsors were not supporting a show, he has said, there was probably something wrong with the show - perhaps it was not entertaining enough.

Auckland audiences can decide for themselves, with two Jenden works, The Nickle Nackle Tree (reviewed below) and 1001 Nights, on at the Maidment Theatre.

Jenden attributes much of his success to author Lynley Dodd, whose books have often been the source for his successful family shows.

"That has meant we have to get the theatres 94 per cent full - and we have," he says.

"Lynley also taught me that books have to be read to little people by big people. And that 3-year-olds do not get to come to the theatre unless an adult brings them."

Jenden builds sophisticated humour and references to be enjoyed by adults into his famous family shows. He believes this improves the quality for the youngsters in the audience, too.

New Zealand's 3- to 6-year-olds are well-read, he says, and have fairly sophisticated theatrical tastes.

Those near-full houses would seem to back his claims and poke a stick in the eye of Australia's ABC Network that recently decided Maclary Theatre Productions would go over the heads of Australian kiddies of that age.

For adult audiences, Jenden whips up a good fantasy with a compelling plot, serves it with dollops of acidic humour and satire and dresses the whole thing up to be appealing to the eye.

Design, including an interest in wearable art, is the third string in his career bow.

"When I try to give people what I think they want," he confesses of his outrageous dance productions, "it usually fails - in my mind, at least."

But when he gives in to his most wicked impulses and does what he really wants, even if it is in the most questionable of taste, his audience laps it up and keeps coming back for more.

He gives one famously bad-taste example: a skit about "Charles, Di and Betty" set to the music from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

"The audience I have developed at Circa in Wellington is not an 'edgy' audience," he says. "Demographically, they are all over the place, with a lot of middle-class and middle-aged people included.

"But I think people react favourably to things so long as there is integrity in the show's structure: that it is not just dressing up in drag for the vicarious pleasure. There has to be reason, a necessity, for it."

Jenden's 1001 Nights is the fourth production in his Fairy Stories series, which began in Auckland in 1993. Fairy Stories I was revived at Circa in 1996 and Fairy Stories II and III followed, by popular demand. The two latter and a number of other Paul Jenden productions, including his Dance for Dummies series, which dares to poke fun at dance itself, have not been produced outside of Wellington.

1001 Nights is a little different from its predecessors and has been judged the "best one yet" by Circa fans.

At the time he was making the show, he expected the two stalwarts of his company, dancers Louis Solino and Kate O'Rourke, to be unavailable due to their involvement in Lord of the Rings. Jenden knew that they would be looked for and missed, so changed the usual structure. Then the filming schedules changed and Solino and O'Rourke were back in the fold. Jane Duncan is the third dancer, Jenden the fourth.

"When you are desperate for commercial success there is a temptation to stay with the successful formula," Jenden admits. "But it is always better to keep diversifying and to keep surprising people."

Jenden is the master of sequin and velvet, ostrich feather and fan. But beneath the glamour and the comedy so lavish in his shows, there does lurk a serious side.

"To do good comedy you have to be aware of the tragic aspect, too," he says. And some of his glitzy, out-there productions have tackled serious topics such as incest and abuse.

"Setting some of these really knotty problems in a comic context makes it possible to talk about them," he says.

The seven stories of Sinbad presented in 1001 Nights each take their name from a film. One is named after Once Were Warriors.

"It deals with an abusive relationship," says Jenden. "You see the woman carrying on while she is being beaten up. There is a sickness in that, which gives an edge to the humour."

While researching the original story of 1001 Nights, Jenden discovered the same denigration of traditional fairy stories in the Islamic culture as we have in the West - the attitude that they belong in the nursery or with women, and that they are certainly not considered high art.

"In spite of that, fairytales last," he says. "I think they are a very deep part of who we really are."

* The Nickle Nackle Tree, until April 19; 1001 Nights, until April 16, Maidment Theatre, choreographed and directed by Paul Jenden.