Dancers/choreographers Rodney Bell and Malia Johnston met in the late 1990s through disability-led performing arts organisation Touch Compass. A wheelchair user since a 1991 motorbike accident left him paralysed from the chest down, Bell discovered dance after representing New Zealand in wheelchair basketball.
The duo lost touch when Bell (Ngāti Maniapoto) moved to the United States to embark on an award-winning five-year stint with California’s Axis Dance Company, but then found himself homeless on the streets of San Francisco.
When Bell made it home in 2015, he reunited with Johnston and her Movement of the Human dance company. They created one of Aotearoa’s most powerful dance works, the critically acclaimed and multi-award winning Meremere, which tells Bell’s life story.
Now they’ve made Imprint, one of two dances in the NZ Dance Company’s double-bill Whenua. They describe it as “stripped back”, about the physicality of the body and our connection to our whakapapa and whenua – ancestral roots and land.
Rodney Bell and Malia Johnston, why have you made Imprint?
RB: It has evolved from our very first meeting through Touch Compass and then creating an artistic friendship, which goes deep into questions like what is dance and who are we all in our different bodies? Through our creative networks – our friends and our work – we got this amazing example to make this new work.
MJ: Backing up what Rodney said, this is the evolution of the relationship we have built up over a long time. When we were offered the chance to collaborate again, it felt like a natural progression and an opportunity to back up some of the work we did on Meremere. With Imprint, we were offered the challenge of co-direction.
It evolved from thinking about how we can shift our processes and create space for new ways of looking at how we make dance. Imprint is a holistic term for the idea of where we stand, where we come from, the ties to our past and our ancestors. So, there’s an environmental tone to it, but there’s also the personal – the impression we make on others – and how that relates to who we are on the land we’re in.
So, how did you make it?
MJ: We don’t make work in a “5, 6, 7, 8 and dance” way. We ask dancers [six appear in Imprint] to respond to certain things and, in this case, it was in direct response to Rodney dancing with them. Every day, every morning, we would gather, and Rodney would dance with them. Then they would go and work on that material, so Imprint is based on the very physical, very fresh impressions and interactions they had with him.
RB: Malia spoke a lot about foundation and the different, sometimes small foundations, which create relationships and work itself. I felt truly alive, truly open in the movements and there was a lot of reciprocity – giving and receiving – so I’m grateful for the influence that these dancers had on Malia and me.
What sort of an imprint have you made on one another?
RB: Malia is my beautiful artistic friend, my soul sister in dance, but you have to watch what you say around her because she is a dream-maker. If you have a dream and you tell her, she’s going to make it happen.
I came home from the United States, where I had gone through a bit, and I had a few medical things like a bladder reconstruction. So, I came home to retire, I was going to put my wheels up for a bit. I was just sitting around on the couch when Malia announced we were going to work together! It was like when you shake a Fanta bottle up; that’s how my body felt when we started.
MJ: Rodney and I had worked together with Touch Compass, and we’d done a few shows. We talked back then about making a piece and that had already always stayed in the back of my mind. Then he left the country and there was a period of time when we were not in touch, we were doing our own thing. I had already decided we were going to make something together when I heard he was coming back!
When Rodney and I started working together, he said he wanted to make a trio but after the first week, I could see it wasn’t a trio so, I said, “I think we need to tell your story.” I had heard whispers that he’d been living homeless in the USA, and that gave me quite a shock. I didn’t understand how it could have happened. Rodney is a special performer in the way that he shares his life with people; he doesn’t bring to his story any kind of remorse or anger, even though the things he has experienced are tough.
I feel that when people can hear and see stories like Meremere, where there’s no begrudging of the experience, they can really reflect. Meremere shows dance is healing and not just for those who do it, but for those who came and saw it.
Rodney, did you dance before your accident?
RB: On the inside! My injury brought it out – and it needed to come out. I was a rugby player; I did marathons and was starting to get into triathlons. The rhythm of running is a song in itself in your body and when it becomes a song that you just want to keep singing, you want to run further and further.
I got into wheelchair basketball and then I met Catherine Chappell, who was starting Touch Compass. I could see it – and dance – was an exciting, playful space so that took away my trepidation and I became a founding member of the company.
What’s next for you both:
RB: I do a lot of work in the advocacy space, so that will keep me busy. Malia and I are already talking about another show…
MJ: The next show we make with Rodney will be called Rodney Bell and Guests. A series of improvisations/live, in-the-moment interaction with guest artists performed with music.
Imprint is part of the double bill dance show Whenua, that has been performed in Wellington, Holland and Tauranga. Whenua plays at Auckland’s Q Theatre on Thursday, April 11, and Friday, April 12.
