Time for Michael Parmenter to step off terror ride

At 46 he's discovered he's not a choreographer - he's a theatre director, Michael Parmenter tells arts editor GILBERT WONG.

You work on an artistic project for a year. It does not go well. In fact, it goes so badly that when it's finished, you don't go to see it.

Later, the body that commissioned it drops it from its programme. It becomes the work people want to forget.

That work was Empty Chairs, commissioned by the Royal New Zealand Ballet last year.

The choreographer who could not even bear to see its final version is Michael Parmenter. He was sick, he says. Parmenter had a dose of nightingale fever.

The ailment exists only in the imagination of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. Says Parmenter: "It's his description of the creative gift which can be an illness as well."

Nightingale Fever is also the name for the solo work Parmenter brings to the Maidment Studio Theatre this week.

In the piece Parmenter, the person we know as a dancer and choreographer, mostly talks. There are three short dances.

"The performance is about the archaeology of a work. I've always found choreography very difficult. The publicness of it, the time pressure. This particular task was even more excruciating than most."

At one point Parmenter was a fortnight into a month-long period in which he had to choreograph with the ballet a 22-minute work based on a string quartet by Shostakovich. Parmenter had come up with 15 seconds.

"It was a nightmare, every direction was a wrong turn. I was going home and thinking, maybe if I stop taking my medication I will get ill and the director of the ballet will let me off."

Like a dancer he begins to use physical analogies. When the creative process is going well it's like a hang-glider flight, he says. Bold new vistas unfold under a free-flying mind.

He likens the reverse to his visit to the Gold Coast theme park he visited to take the ride called the Tower of Terror. You're strapped into a seat, raised high above the park and then dropped, racing to death.

At the last instant, machinery stops you from becoming a red puddle.

He won't say it categorically, but Parmenter's days as a choreographer may be over. Empty Chairs might have been it.

"Because of my age it was a sort of last stand at making a pure dance piece. I haven't choreographed anything since."

At 46, Parmenter says last year proved a revelation. "I've discovered that I'm not a choreographer. I am a theatre director. Jerusalem and Seven Deadly Sins [his earlier works for the Royal New Zealand Ballet] were theatre pieces.

"My next project will be an opera. I've finally caught on that this is what I should be doing. I've spent the past 20 years choreographing, but when I was working in the theatrical genre I became a much nicer person, more relaxed and confident."

* Nightingale Fever by Michael Parmenter opens at the Maidment Studio on Wednesday.