The return of the gyrating Native

By BERNADETTE RAE

Call it "theatre". Call it a "live music and dance show". Call it a performance of future trend. But do not call it a "mixed media" performance - musician Andrew McMillan loathes that term.

Native, a collaboration between McMillan and dancer/choreographer Leonie Douglas, is billed as a new movement in performing arts, where music and dance are created together, breaking barriers and expectations and defying a neat definition.

It promises a heady blend of new Pacific music, played by McMillan, on saxophone, clarinet, conch and keyboard, with three Cook Island drummers, an electric bass and electronics player, and a sixth man on vibraphone, glockenspiel and assorted bells and cymbals.

Douglas is the solo dancer and claims she has created a new dance style, reflecting McMillan's explosive beats with a hip- and pelvis-driven movement repertoire that draws on both Island dance tradition and her own background in classical ballet and contemporary dance.

The collaboration began with McMillan's desire to add movement to the work he was already doing with his eclectic New Pacific Music Ensemble, which combines Pacific music and Rarotongan drumming with jazz, improvisation and hip-hop.

Douglas, who graduated from the New Zealand School of Dance in 2000, was inspired by the extraordinary Germaine Acogny's African dance workshop, held for mainly Maori dancers, in Auckland in 2001. Douglas is not Maori, but a grandmother was part-Fijian and part-Portuguese.

"I was looking for a way to add an indigenous flavour to my dance style: to find a basic physicality and extend that through my dance training," she says.

With their first choreographic explorations came a concept that developed into Native.

"There is a native in us all. It is our natural, innate state," says Douglas.

"But it becomes masked, layered with life experiences, especially as we get older. Culture and the media condition people into pockets of behaviour - you could call it cultural conditioning. The result is we lose our sense of deeper reality and our intuition."

With a small grant from Arts Alive, Native "part one" was performed at Bats Theatre in Wellington in September last year, with three dancers, and Douglas directing and choreographing.

"That part was based on the universal theme of birth and relationships," she says.

"It was inspired by all the immigrant people we have here in New Zealand, and how we can all relate to those universal experiences."

Douglas is reluctant to reveal too much about Native "part two" before the event, except to say it is less a dance show than its predecessor, and focuses "more on being human, in different circumstances".

The idea of stripping away layers of conditioning - from Pacific, colonial, immigrant and contemporary culture - is a strong theme within the work, revealing the struggle of Aotearoa as a nation of assorted immigrant navigators, and creating for the audience the experience of the native within us all.

Douglas hopes the project will continue and the two parts will one day be combined in one bigger show.

For now, expect Native, in its one-hour format, to chill the blood and warm the heart with its dark and surreal textures and rhythm and its blend of sonic and somatic creativity.

* Native plays at the Herald Theatre at 8pm, Friday, February 21, and Saturday, February 22, and at 6pm, Sunday, February 23.