New Zealand's Black Grace at the Kimmel

As world cultures have assimilated across the globe, there has also been a concomitant fusion of art forms that we, in our narcissistic First World experience, most often view as the fusion of indigenous art sources with our more Western contemporary forms. Whether it was the Japanese influence on late 19th-Century European and American art or African influences on cubism, these assimilations have occurred well into modern history, but now have been accelerated by mass media and communications technology.

In the 20th Century the dance world has seen influences from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in the earliest forms of modern dance, but today these fusions are more apparent to mainstream audiences. The problem plaguing many of these fused art forms is that they become paste-ons of divergent cultures— or mongrel hybrids that present the stylized surfaces of the art forms in an effort to appear globally hip.

A recent example for Philadelphia audiences was the British-Indian choreographer Akbar Khan, whose efforts (at the Live Arts Festival a few years ago) to fuse classical Indian with modern dance appeared too forced, formulaic and uninspired.

Sensuous revelation

In direct contrast to these failed efforts at bridging cultures and art forms was the quite thrilling and brilliantly executed dance of the 15-year-old New Zealand company Black Grace, which integrated into a new art form— rather than a paste-and-cut assemblage— many aspects of modern dance with Samoan and South Pacific indigenous dance forms in a most memorable performance at the Kimmel Center. Not only did the troupe's high energy and muscularly rhythmic dancing excite a diverse audience, but it opened the minds and hearts of an audience to cultures and artistic expression that were a sensuous revelation to discover on stage.

Black Grace opened with an excerpt from Fa'a Ulutao ("spearhead"), referencing symbols within a traditional Samoan tattoo, and the dancers' athletic thrusts of arms and torsos shook us out of our seats to sense an energetic tribal, warrior expression of the energy of a culture long suppressed by Western colonial interventions. When a group of dancers sped along the floor, each propelled by two arms and one leg, dragging the other passive leg bent at the knee, we also understood we'd be experiencing novel dance forms— seeming grounded crab-like animals dragging appendages or tails that hardly slowed them down. We saw that although a Nijinsky could bring the power and virility of a faun into a Ballet Russe L'après-midi d'un faun or Merce Cunningham could more abstractly suggest animal sensibilities among his dancers, we could also find the natural world as a creative source of powerful and graceful movement in the far-off South Pacific.

Slap dancing

The signature eye-opener for a Western audience was the presentation of Samoan slap dance (Fa'ataupati). The entire body is an instrument for rhythmic patterns, where feet stamp and stomp, and hands not only clap each other but also find the whole body to play off of.

Using the hands in a slapping fashion has been part of traditional dances in Greece, Hungary, South Africa, Hawaii (via hula dance) and in African-American dance (in the hambone dance). But Samoans appear to have evolved its exuberance into a total dance form where the slapped rhythms are danced through the whole body.

Black Grace's brilliant choreographer/director, Neil Ieremia, joined these slap dancing techniques with modern dance forms in a work like Minoi, which also integrates traditional Samoan vocalizations with a Western childhood song, a counting ditty from "Sesame Street."

Ieremia is able in one evening's performance to map a culture in a dance, "Lausae (Tapulu Tele)," where dancers spring over, catapult from and pose over enormous, rounded rock forms on stage—river stones symbolic of feminine strength and beauty—which then become body platforms for dancers to lie prostrate while a traditional painful process of tattoo inking of the skin is performed on their backs or thighs. As a commission for the Royal New Zealand Ballet he created "Deep Far" as a reflection of radical changes in New Zealand weather, snow in summer, and droughts in winter, via a primarily modern dance vocabulary of a quartet that featured dissolutions of the quartet into discordant, polarized pairings, that resolved into a harmonic fusing of bodies, offering a more optimistic scenario of future climate change.

Politics without polemics

Ieremia also manifested a political sensibility that would be welcome in more Western artists, generating a work called Gathering Clouds that was compelling and enduring without polemics. This work, presented in excerpts, was created after a racist New Zealand economist denigrated the Polynesian immigration to New Zealand. In Exodus, we experienced— through languid and reflective movements that might have been too homogenous— the soulful experiences of people emigrating from a homeland. It was reminiscent of African-American dance and music that mourned the loss of home and tradition while remaining connected to a spiritual belief system.

In his own affirmation of what his culture can become in a Western society, Ieremia set the second excerpt from Gathering Clouds— "Keep Honour Bright"— as an abstract dance to the Goldberg Variations that came close to achieving a musicality in physical movement for which Mark Morris has become our contemporary model.

German influence

We also learned from Ieremia, live on stage before each section, that the German influence of a Bach was not so alien to the South Pacific (Samoa had been under German influence as a colony for 14 years in the early 20th Century). Iermeia appeared before each of the evening's half-dozen or so sections, exhibiting a most appealing charm and a sharp intelligence that greatly added to the audience's understanding of the work. Contemporary Western choreographers might follow his lead to raise awareness and "grow" their dance audiences here.

Iermeia related the story of when he first informed his mother and father of his decision to leave his bank job to attend dance school: His mother cried, and his father turned his head back and forth with a tsking sound of disapproval. Iermeia later used his father's voice in a dance work at the Kimmel, and what we heard was not the disapproving tsking, but a looping "Ohh" sound of the father's voice embedded into an artist son's contemporary gift: a recontexturalized honoring of his family's culture.

Shortsighted budgeting

I should note that the artistic and marketing staff that brought Black Grace to us had been laid off two weeks earlier by the Kimmel Center as a shortsighted budgeting cut. The future business plan, according to an Inquirer report, of having the Center go empty to become more of a rental hall for those who can pay, and to offer more pop entertainment, means a radical shift backwards at the Kimmel, with the audience, as well as the city's larger cultural life, losing the inspired presenting that brought us Black Grace.