Until recently, the NZ Festival was pretty much Wellington’s primary way of experiencing international work beyond the odd production coming through St James Theatre. It is an unfair burden for one event to bear: to somehow represent the arts from all around the world, let alone be responsible for showcasing a healthy range of local works alongside them. Fortunately, our community is maturing, and nowhere more so than with the growth and persistence of the brilliant Kia Mau Festival, now in its 3^rd year. With this and other initiatives in town (NZ Fringe Festival’s international programme, The Performance Arcade, Lux Light Festival) we are now able to experience different definitions of the international that were not accessible through the limits of one biannual programme. It is such a significant step for us that this week Kia Mau presented work by a Canadian indigenous artist and company: Santee Smith dancing NeoIndigenA by Kaha:wi Dance Theatre.

I have long mourned the fact that despite robust export of Maori/Pacific dance (Atamira, Okareka, Mau, and Black Grace), we do not see as much reciprocal presentation and profile of indigenous artists from around the world here on our main stages. So it is very exciting that through the work of festival directors Hone Kouka and Miria George we can participate in a global conversation about indigeneity – not just through the broadcast and touring of our own artists – but also through welcoming people to our country, to bring their world views here, with the opportunity for them to understand what it is to be a manuhiri, and to experience our unique ways of looking at the world and doing things in Aotearoa.

Santee Smith is from the Kahnyen’kehàka (Mohawk) Nation. The great continent of Turtle Island is as present in her dance as much as the ocean and islands of the Pacific are present in the choreography of Lemi Ponifasio or Neil Ieremia. From her opening moments, she moves with a physical language born of an entirely different landscape. Never far from the sea, we are always aware of its impermanence, fluidity, and ability to wash all away. We cannot know the vast forests like those of Canada, we cannot know what it is like to be so far from the borders of the ocean, to not know the ocean, to feel so surrounded by the body of a great continent, held within its belly.

Like Turtle Island, and like her Turtle Clan, Smith holds so much of her place within her body – whether she is crawling through underworlds or reaching up to the skies, her jagged contortions carry the feeling of roots, bones, branches and horns; while her softer movements are of the soil, damp leaf matter, and patient rock. Her gestures return often to the abdomen, the belly, and the centre: a grounding or centring within the visceral space of the body that is echoed by her navigation through the concentric rings of a pattern painted on the floor. It is a spiritual journey through dance, and a ritual too: carefully prepared with the smudging of the venue before each performance, and the gathering of spirits and ancestors into her movements. Various bones, jawbones, and horns lie in piles on the floor. A branch crowns the space, bifurcated and symmetrical, like the sets of horns that sprout from the crowns of deer, elk, caribou, and moose. 

With two of these antlers clutched in her fists she claws at the stage and the air. The antler is a branch that sprouts from flesh – the body that would be a tree, forking and spreading its fingers to the sky, not with soft flesh: rather the hardness of wood, and the sharpness of sticks without leaves. After holding these taonga aloft, Smith clutches them to her chest like an empty rib cage, or balances her head where the skull of some beast once lay. I am reminded of how important the animal body is to First Nations, where one wears another body’s skin over their own, and with reverence take these animals’ names and spirits for their clans. There is animism to her movement that is expressed differently to our Pacific movement lexicons. Maori movement draws on either natural elements (wiri – the rippling of water, heat waves, or trembling of plants), cosmologies (ancestors evoked above and below), or combat (the taiaha). Instead, Smith embodies nature through the beasts and denizens of her landscape.  And yet, I see the trembling palm, I see her gather the spirits of the space to her body in the opening sequence, and there is, for an instant, the prance of the warrior as she leaps across the stage.

There is little about architecture in this dance, instead Smith moves through evoked yet tangible spiritual places, most of all the deep chthonic spaces of the body and the ground where she twists limbs and organs to the guttural enunciations of the soundtrack. A lot needs to be said about the outstanding sonic landscape for this work, which fills the stage with a visceral score composed mainly from the sounds of the human voice: twisting and shaping breath, exhalations, gurgles, and utterances from the fleshy body and its vocal cavities. It is a stunning composition, involving the creative contributions of eight different artists[1], (including Smith) to create a layered, rich, and compelling tirade of feelings that is not just aural but felt, sensed, tasted. Late in the work Smith thrashes to a drumbeat accompanied by the most fervent panting. Each pant sucks energy from the body only to leave a cavernous space for the next breath to fill with the same energy, that empties again, a cycle of breath direct from the stomach, hungry for new air and those things that the stomach hungers for. And so the stage grunts with this beast-like force throughout. As her spirits and ancestors swirl above her, Smith prances with horns on her forehead – the horned gods that my Western ancestors taught each other to fear, that caused them to fear the darkness and tell stories about it.

Darkness and lighting twists with the same energy as Smith’s dance and the incredible sound-making. The lighting design matches her performance journey beautifully, working with the cosmologies that Smith conjures up in the space. The centre, the body, and the earth echo with the foot that claims it, and is marked by the circular floor design that the lighting interacts with beautifully – cementing the sense of place and a grounded-ness that in Aotearoa we call whenua.

It is a powerful performance of amazing physicality, sensuality, and breath. I did squirm sometimes at the overuse of gobo lighting. Having seen a lot of Canadian design, I know there is a propensity to splash gobo lighting around a lot, especially tree patterns, and not just in Cirque de Soleil productions. But this is Smith’s whakapapa, and a part of the experience of her country. The dappled sunlight through leaves is a quintessential part of the Canadian sense of home, and with it the changing patterns and colours in that space between earth and sky. I also felt uncomfortable with the late arrival of Western stringed instruments into the mix. This scene is accompanied by more classical dance movements, almost arabesque in style for the lifted arms and feet, complete with some contemporary dance tropes: the spinning-round-to-sitting-down move, the extended-limb-and-pull-back-from-it, the romantic way these movements fill the space and relate to the body’s nature or to nature itself. For me it is rather genteel and awkward after the experiences that came before. However, it is in these moments that Smith is wrestling with the tensions that perplex indigenous culture and dance forms regarding the balance between modernity and tradition, separating colonial artefacts from contemporary situations. It is not a tidy process, since Western blood has soaked into the landscape both here and in Canada. Thus, to dance the story of Turtle Island or Aotearoa is to invoke this blood as much as those of the animals, spirits, and people who were there long before.

One of the moments that Smith spoke her language on stage stood out to me. In the darkness I tried to phoneticise what I heard with my English letters and my pencil: dakuhyunya [sic]. I did not learn how to spell the word, but later on I learned that this invocation of her ancestors’ language translates best as ‘make my road / make my path’. The dancer bears the name of her European ancestors as much as her Mohawk name Tekaronhiáhkhwa. Her living breathing culture of the Six Nations is a modern people, as well as a people with ancient traditions and connections to the landscape. So it is appropriate that this word without letters stuck in my mind like a pebble, a sound that I repeated to myself for hours after. I will make my path. 

We are invited at the end to write a message on a ribbon for our ancestors and attach it to the set. I am a British-born immigrant to Aotearoa, who arrived here on my family’s small sailing boat after travelling the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. My partner is a white Canadian with Finnish and Anglo-Saxon heritage. I stare at the red fabric for five minutes in the Bats Theatre lobby, poise the marker pen over it a couple of times, but cannot think what to say. I think of my whakapapa, but cannot find it in the stony fells of Northumberland where I was born, nor in the small German town where my ancestors were burgermeisters, or the quaint villages where my grandparents lived. I close my eyes and all I see is the sea that surrounded our boat on our long passages, all I feel is its great swell heaving us up and down, bearing us on its winds. It is my last moment of this show: my own reaching for some elemental, environmental experience that I carry with me, and within my own body. I am my people and my ancestors. But I am also my own experiences and where I am now. I make my own path.

If you want your own experience of this fantastic work, it is on at Bats Theatre until this Saturday 10^th June.

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