Throwing away the rule book

By BERNADETTE RAE

After three soul-searching years, Neil Ieremia, artistic director of the dance company Black Grace, has a new tattoo from wrist to elbow on his right arm.

It's an intense and significant work, titled Surface, and represents a new concept of self.

He describes the latter as "a reluctant but liberating admission of who I am not". And cracks a joke about retitling Colin McCahon's iconic painting.

The tattoo - tatau in Samoan - came at the end of a difficult and uncomfortable process, he says. There are still some parts of the complicated and beautiful design etched into his skin by Inia Taylor, apprentice of the late master Pauolo Suluape, awaiting completion - just finishing touches, filling in blocks of colour.

Ieremia's identity crisis began with a trip to Samoa in 2000 when he received the blunt message that his Samoan elders did not appreciate the mingling of traditional Samoan heritage with contemporary dance.

That was a shock, forcing Ieremia to ask himself some tough questions.

Why did he, born in Cannons Creek, Porirua, have to use slap dance in his work in Black Grace?

Why did he have to work with traditional motifs, with traditional Samoan song?

Part of the answer, at least, was simple.

"There has been a great deal of expectation," he says. "I have always been Neil the New Zealand-born Samoan choreographer. I have always been defined by my Samoan-ness."

He is annoyed that he went along with that for so long. "I wanted to represent my parents," he says. "I wanted to represent where I thought I was from."

Involvement in a project "full of Pacific Island people" - which he will not name - added to his confusion.

He became so disappointed with the attitude of the young people he had to work with, with their lack of desire and discipline, that he walked away.

"It was another crucial knock," he says. "Another collision of cultures, with people I thought were my own. I had to realise that though we were of the same blood, had the same soil in our veins, that we were born here, of Samoan parents, we were different.

"I realised that subcultures are so specific. People in Mt Albert are different to people in Ponsonby, and they are different to people in Porirua.

"It was frightening to have to let go of my old ideas of who I was and where was home.

"Now I know I am more at home here than in Samoa. And I don't think of home as a tangible place any more. It is not that at all. It is an intangible space I inhabit with others who share where cultures collide. And I like it. It is liberating. There is no rule book any more."

So why, now, the traditional tattoo on his arm, and tatau very much the theme of the new work?

Ieremia's father has just completed his journey as a Samoan Talking Chief by having the full body tattoo, or pe'a, carved into his skin at the late age of 64.

It's normally a rite of passage for men in their 20s, but at that age Ieremia snr was busy ensuring his family succeeded in New Zealand. With that responsibility past, he returned to his traditional Samoan church and found the missing pe'a an embarrassment.

Neil Ieremia marvels at the change in his father once the gruelling process was complete. "Now my father walks taller, straighter, with more pride."

Ieremia is not rejecting traditions and values that continue to resound deep within him. He has made his own tattoo, traditional in design, relevant to his own life and evolving culture by wearing it differently on his body.

He has also taken the symbolic forms of the pe'a as the structure for Surface, but is looking at those old and precious ideas "through the filter of who I am not".

"We have to keep making the traditions of the past relevant by acknowledging the external forces at work on the surface."

So Surface resounds to the rhythm of the tattoo tools, as well as to the pulsating original New Zealand tunes of Woodcut Productions and Phil Dadson.

But expect the work to come from a new place in Ieremia's heart.

One major shift is the inclusion of women in the work, only the second time Black Grace has featured female dancers. The first piece which did, Human Language, which premiered last year in the Black Grace and Friends season, is repeated in this programme.

"I wanted to acknowledge the strength of women," says Ieremia. "My mother sat with my father when he was receiving his pe'a, holding his hand throughout.

"And who said Black Grace is an all-male company? I am free. I can do what I like."

* What: Surface & Human Language by Black Grace

* Where: Sky City Theatre

* When: From tonight to April 5