Following the path of Dunedin’s hidden Toitū Stream before dancing live in John Wickliffe Square at the Exchange will mark a first for dancer and choreographer Oliver Connew.
It will be the first time he has made live choreography for a site-specific work performed outdoors.
"It’s quite new to me."
Connew, who grew up in Wellington and studied dance from the age of 10, returned to New Zealand last year after 12 years dancing in other people’s works in Europe.
"Making my own work has always felt like it makes more sense here in Aotearoa. And I’m kind of trying to figure out why that might be. But there’s something about being connected to the story of this place on the Earth.
"I feel like I’m making work that is somehow grounded in the place that I’m from, in the story that I’m part of somehow, the story of the people, the different ways of immigration in this place, and the impact of that. That’s my story."
Discovering his new home, like many New Zealand cities, has a buried stream running under it that was covered up by settlers in the 1860s when they built the city, intrigued him.
The work fitted well with Dance Ōtepoti City Moves’ mandate to bring dance out on to the streets so people who might not encounter dance normally get the chance. So he proposed a procession tracing the stream followed by an improvised dance performance at the original mouth of the stream.
"For me it is about remembrance and reverence and connecting my own body to the waters of the stream — the waters in my body and the waters in the stream — and making a connection between those."
It also links in nicely with his interest in the environment which he sidelined many years ago when he got the opportunity to go to New Zealand School of Dance to study ballet.
Unfortunately he realised "pretty soon" after starting dance school that a professional ballet career was not the right thing for him. So as soon as he graduated he "hopped on a plane to Berlin" in 2013, drawn by its reputation as one of Europe’s "hot spots" for artists and creatives, including contemporary dancers.
Working across Europe, he found improvised dance sat well with him and he joined Norway-based Olive Bieringa (a New Zealander) and Otto Ramstad, of Body Cartography, in their work and became a member of Berlin-based dance ensemble Cranky Bodies a/company.
"Because I went to the New Zealand School of Dance doing classical ballet, and that was a technical training in a very traditional art form, I had to find for myself, outside of my traditional education, what made sense to me and what was important to me in this post-modern lineage."
He also worked with choreographer Peter Pleyer who gathered a group of dancers that made improvised dance for 10 years. They would get together for a couple of months each year and dance every day.
"We’d talk and we would develop a shared language that was intuitive — these things that we share between each other, the history that we have together as dancers."
Connew later moved to France to do his master’s in choreography at the Centre Choregraphique National Montpellier before moving back to Berlin just after the Covid pandemic.
"Berlin had become much more difficult to live in, whereas when I first moved there it was a city where a lot of things were possible — mostly because the rents were so cheap. So you didn’t have to work so much and that gave you a lot of time to do your own thinking and dancing and meeting people and all these sorts of things."
But as Berlin gentrified and elected a right-wing government which made major cuts to arts funding, the city became less appealing for many artists.
"A lot of people started moving away and a lot of people started thinking about different ways of making art that wasn’t necessarily beholden to arts funding."
Many of the people Connew, who is also a trained somatic movement educator with body-mind centring, had danced with for many years lost the funding they had received for decades.
"So I lost work as well. And ... on a personal level as well, [it] just seemed the right moment to return. It had been a long time: 12 years is a long time away from home."
While he was living in Berlin he had begun studying an environmental science and ecology degree online through Massey University. As he was enjoying it he thought it would be good to study it in person.
"So at that point, I was like, ‘OK, I’ll move back to New Zealand’. And I decided on Otago because it has a good ecology programme."
Connew is coming to realise that his two interests, dance and the environment, relate to each other.
"I’m still figuring it out for myself personally. But for sure this work that I’m making now seems all connected. It’s these two different ways of approaching similar questions in a way of like, ‘how do we live better with the rest of the living world?’ — I think there’s multiple ways to approach that question and multiple ways to answer it . . . ."
In summer break he has been working on the Toitū stream work as well as working as a research assistant which involved counting plants on mountain roadsides to track the movement of weeds as they move up the mountain as the climate changes.
"So it’s been this perfect mix of both my approaches to this question. I think the way that they’re influencing one another is probably quite intuitive. I can’t pin it down. It doesn’t seem obvious, but for sure they’re influencing one another."
Performing outside means he has no control over what is happening around him.
"You’re making the work with whatever is happening around you and so it becomes more collaborative in that way. Like you’re collaborating with the sounds you can hear — in this example, the sounds of the traffic.
"It’s a very responsive and intuitive way of performing and dancing. And that’s really nice to do in an environment that you don’t fully control."
The dance work comes at a good time for him before he cracks into his third year of study, but he hopes to continue to make new work.
There is an idea gaining popularity called "daylighting" streams: bringing the streams that were buried back above ground and all the life that they support as well.
"So I think that it’s also a work that can probably travel as well. It would be really interesting to research the similarities and the differences between these places and the unique histories of each of these streams."
Nearly 12 months after settling back in New Zealand, Connew feels he is still settling in.
"You come back a different person as well. In some ways I still feel a little bit foreign. I don’t know if that will change. I’ve heard that once you leave a place you split yourself in two a little bit."
But he is enjoying living in a country which is a lot less bureaucratic than France and Germany.
"So it’s much easier. It’s a bit more relaxed in New Zealand, which is nice — people are friendlier. The bus drivers are very friendly in Dunedin: it’s fantastic. I think that’s my favourite thing about Dunedin."
TO SEE
‘The Toitū Stream Procession’, begins in Serpentine Ave and ends at the Exchange, Saturday, February 21 at 2pm (rainy day back-up is Sunday, February 22).
