By PETER CALDER
* Poet, scriptwriter, performer. Died aged 55.
One evening in early 1970, Alan Brunton was sharing a stage with some of the elder statesmen of New Zealand poetry. Kendrick Smithyman was there and Keith Sinclair, and Karl Stead too as I recall.
When his turn came, the youngest reader, plainly unintimidated by the company he was keeping, strode to the edge of the platform and dropped the needle on a scratchy LP. The insistent guitar riff of Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love filled the hall.
"I just thought," he drawled raffishly after the entire song had played, "you'd like to hear some poetry before I started reading."
The stunt seems slightly gauche now, suspicious as we are of exuberance and grand gesture. But for Brunton, who died suddenly in Amsterdam last week, exuberance was a native language.
As poet and performer, he was always breaking boundaries and inciting those who worked with him to do the same.
In July 1969 (coinciding, to his endless delight, with the first moon walk), he founded the poetry magazine Freed, which took its name from his manifesto that the word is freed from the traditions that stifle creativity.
In the quarter century that followed, he published 12 volumes of poetry (latterly under his own imprint, Bumper Books) and co-edited an anthology of New Zealand poems from those early decades.
He was writer in residence at Canterbury University in 1998. But more visibly, he co-founded with partner Sally Rodwell the enduring, anarchic and inventive experimental theatre troupe Red Mole, which cut a wild yet elegant dash across the cultural life of the nation.
Like many of our artists, he was more honoured abroad than at home. He wrote pointedly in a recent biographical note that he had appeared at international festivals in Colombia, Denmark and Norway but not yet in his own country. Yet in its bases in New York, New Mexico and Amsterdam from 1978 to 1988, Red Mole was legendary.
Brunton and Rodwell returned to Wellington in late 1988 and Red Mole prospered, staging performances and workshops and sponsoring tours by international performers.
He had just begun a new tour with a show called Grooves of Glory when he died. He is survived by Rodwell and a daughter, Ruby.
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