HIGH CALIBRE DOCUMENTARY ABOUT INNOVATIVE AND CONTROVERSIAL 1940S DANCE GROUP |
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) Dance of the Instant: the New Dance Group A film by Shirley Horrocks Researcher, Marianne Schultz at The Auckland Performing Arts Centre: TAPAC, Auckland 5 Oct 2008 [1hr 20 mins] Reviewed by Sue Cheesman, 7 Oct 2008 |
Auckland's TAPAC theatre was full on Sunday afternoon as we eagerly awaited the premiere of this documentary film and the reconstruction that accompanied it as part of the Tempo Dance Festival programme.
Directed by Shirley Horrocks, Dance of the Instant captures, through interviews and archival film footage, an important moment in New Zealand's dance history. The New Dance Group existed in post war Wellington from 1945 to 1947. Wellington at this time had an atmosphere open to change with its first café - The French café - where everyone hung out, so to speak, at their own self designated tables. It was the right place right time to bring these talented and independent thinking individuals together to form The New Dance Group.
Prior to the film screening Marianne Schultz reconstructed two excerpts on today's contemporary dancers from Backlit. This group of woman were dressed in tunics and bare footed in keeping with dress code of that era. Watching this live performance I got a sense of the use of strong diagonals lines, sharp angular arms shapes, very ordered groupings and a specific range of vocabulary including a scissors jump with a turn. Devices such as canon, unison and action-reaction were prominent ways of structuring these snippets.
This seemed to be in keeping with the modern dance idiom of the time, whether that is German Expressionism in Europe or American Modern Dance. It is always difficult to fully recapture the movement and especially the dynamics on dancers who are very differently trained, so it was special to see the excerpts again in the film, with those very sharp dynamics and the hard intensity piercing the space.
An excerpt called Sabotage in the Factory makes a social/political commentary capturing the mechanical machine like precision of the factory floor.
Interestingly, the film suggests that the four principal members - Phillip Smithells, Rona Bailey, Edith Sipos and Olive Smithells - were far more socially and politically aware while the other members of the group were students in their first and second years at Teachers Training College in Wellington. Rona Bailey had recently returned from study in New York where she took classes with Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, two famous American modern dance pioneers.
The New Dance group - under the directorship of the non-dancing Philip Smithells, a visionary physical educator with a passionate commitment to dance - practised every Saturday morning and paid a shilling for the class.
Interviews from seven members of the group form the spines of the film and give a real authenticity to the recall of our dance heritage and this group. Unfortunately none of the principal members could be interviewed for this film. However Joy Parkin, one of the group members interviewed, is a particular delight when she starts to dance, recalling her memories through movement.
Commentary by Marianne Schultz throughout the film brings coherence to the other information. She points out that their musical choices were very different and contemporary, including Shostakovich and percussion scores.
This thoroughly modern dance group was innovative and controversial, using contemporary situations and themes to comment on, for example, the bombing of Hiroshima, and they were in direct contrast to the ballet of the time.
I for one will be queuing up to see this film again when it comes out on general release and it will be an asset to any dance department. I hope that others have the foresight to make more dance documentaries of this calibre.
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