BLACK GRACE – PARADISE RUMOUR

Neil Ieremia promised himself and the Board of Black Grace a quiet year in 2023 as the company looks forward to 2025 when it will mark its thirtieth year at the forefront of contemporary dance in Aotearoa New Zealand.

After the hectic pace of 2022 the schedule which saw the company tour widely – performing at the esteemed Joyce Theatre in New York and the prestigious American dance festival extravaganza at Jacobs Pillow, Massachusetts and initiating a newly conceived digital performance space, a breather might have seemed well deserved. But the charming Ieremia is clearly a task master who pushes himself and his dancers to continually break new ground.

Ponsonby News was treated last month to a taster of what is to come from these pre-eminent Pacifika dance story tellers. On the eve of departure for an inaugural performance in the United Arab Emirates’ Sharjah Arts Biennale, four dancers presented extracts from new work Paradise Rumour which was commissioned by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director of the acclaimed event. Ieremia has developed a high energy piece that leaves his dancers gasping for breath and is almost as breathtaking for audiences.

Original music by Anonymouz – composer Faiumu Matthew Salapu has responded to the pioneering electronica of 70s German band Kraftwerk and the sounds of Brazilian hiphop and funk that has inspired Ieremia. The tempo is unrelenting, the choreography precise and intense in response to the rhythms.

Costuming is evocative, creating meaningful and relatable images for those who live in this city with the largest Pacifika population in the world. The work, taking themes of sorrow and acceptance, hope and resistance, control and release, faith and crisis, gives form to a poem of the same name written by Ieremia more than a decade ago and explores, he says, “how far we have really come.”

Also on the packed agenda for this year is the exciting new development that Ieremia and the Board hopes may be a first step in formalising a training ground for dancers. The Company B project will create an opportunity for up to eight young dancers to train with Ieremia and perform alongside the company’s dancers in a season supported by Auckland Live in July. Patrons and donors are stepping up to support the initiative which will also offer production skills and management mentoring.

Not to take his foot off the pedal, September sees Ieremia direct Black Grace in a collaborative endeavour with NZ Opera in a futuristic retelling of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice titled (m)Orpheus. And as his ‘quiet' year of 2023 comes to a close, there will be another iteration of the Art of Black Grace, last year’s digital dance experience that immersed audiences in a sensory world of art, dance and music.

It seems Neil Ieremia is unstoppable. Thirty years is but a puff of air for the phenomenon that is Black Grace. It looks sure to build new generations of dancers who will represent the ever changing stories of the Pacific as they evolve and flow on the seas of time and tide.

The New Zealand Premiere of Paradise Rumour will be staged on 7 June at SkyCity Theatre in Auckland.

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