She walked softly and carried a big stick. And she taught generations to dance. Nigel Benson meets the ghost of Lily Stevens.
Everyone, it seems, has a story about Dunedin dance doyenne the late Lily Stevens.
While driving out to interview one of the women involved in a new piece of dance theatre based on Stevens' life, ODT photographer Jane Dawber reveals that she was Stevens' last pupil.
"She was a fierce little lady," Dawber reminisces.
"She carried around a broom handle and she'd whack you round the back of the knees with it."
Dance has long legs in New Zealand.
The little lady with a large legacy is the subject of a dance work, Lily, that premieres in Dunedin next week.
The show, which runs at the Fortune Theatre during the Dunedin Fringe Festival this week, has been produced by Lyne Pringle, of Wellington, and Kilda Northcott, of Port Chalmers.
The pair formed Bipeds Productions in 2003 and last appeared in Dunedin with Fishnet, which played in the Dunedin Fringe Festival last year.
Pringle has been interviewing Stevens' former pupils for the past three years through a Ministry of Culture and Heritage grant. The interviews are now in the Turnbull Library.
"Lily came about after I started doing a history on dance teachers," Pringle says.
"One character kept popping up whenever I talked to teachers about the comps - Lily Stevens. She was a spinster who had dedicated her life to the dance.
"She used to teach with a stick. She was a such a character and she inspired so many people. It's a very endearing story. A woman who chose to be a spinster artist. There are so many great images in it.
"Lily was always in the front row of the Regent or His Majesty's theatres whenever there was a dance event in town. At the end of a performance she would rise to her feet, all 5ft of her, and shower the stage with flowers as a token of her rapture. Nobody else in Dunedin was that colourful."
Pringle says Lily is a celebration of the vibrant Dunedin dance community.
The work revisits dance classes, concerts and competitions from the 1960s and 1970s.
It was a time when the Royal Academy of Dance would send examiners out to New Zealand every two years to conduct examinations.
Among the oral histories were interviews with Stevens' long-time accompanist, Eli Gray-Smith, and former Dunedin dance teacher Jennie Kjelkaard, the only New Zealander who is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Dancing.
"Lily had a big stick and she wasn't afraid to use it," Gray-Smith chuckles.
"I knew her for a long, long time. I started playing for her when I was 14."
He is 82 now and delighted his old friend is being remembered in Lily.
"I think it's absolutely wonderful they're doing this. She was very forward in Dunedin for dance. She was a wonderful choreographer. She could choreograph anything, from contemporary to fancy dancing - as they called ballet in those days - to interpretive dance and she was very good at national dances.
"She was outstanding for her productions. She'd even write the music herself. She was a multi-artist, really," he says.
"She retired to South Dunedin and then ended her days at Belhaven [Rest Home]."
You sense Lily Stevens would very much have approved of Lily.
More than 30 young pupils from Dance Theatre Arts, the Dunedin School of Ballet and the Bennett School of Ballet and Jazz will appear in the performance, wearing Pringle's original competition costumes.
"We wanted to have an interface with the local dance teachers and communities in order to build a younger and wider audience. We deliberately kept the choreography accessible to appeal to as wide an audience as possible," Pringle says.
You can almost imagine Stevens in the background, whacking legs with her big stick.
A reunion of Stevens' old pupils will attend the performance next Saturday.
Pringle has a personal interest in the dance teacher.
Her grandmother, Linda McDonald, danced in the same Dunedin competitions as Stevens. "But, it was my grandmother's choice to be a mother in Green Island and Lily's choice to travel the world studying dance," she says.
Stevens never found her own Lord of the Dance.
"The play looks at that, too. The poignancy of meeting regret in later life," Pringle says.
"There's a lot of whimsy and surreal threads running through it."
Lily Stevens was born in 1902 and died on March 28, 1996.
She was awarded a Queen's Service Medal for services to ballet in 1982.
Stevens fell in love with dance after seeing celebrated Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova dance at His Majesty's Theatre in Dunedin in 1926.
She later wrote of "sitting in the stalls, moved to tears" at the performance.
When Pavlova died a few months later, Stevens wrote in her scrapbook: "Pavlova is no more. But her influence has remained. Pavlova will be the dream of many generations, a dream of beauty, of the gladness of movement, of the charm of spiritualised dance".
At 24, Stevens' raison d'etre had become dance.
She became a performer, teacher, administrator and adjudicator, based at a Dunedin studio at 26 Moray Pl, up two flights of stairs, until she was well into her 80s.
The Hocken Library has an archive of 12 boxes of Stevens' papers.
"The archive at the Hocken is amazing. So far, I have sifted through three of those boxes, which contain scrapbooks, music scores, choreographic notes, diaries and memorabilia covering several decades of her output as a teacher and choreographer," Pringle says.
"There are journals filled with her obsessive writings about dance. Her imagination was incredible. She'd choreograph these amazing end-of-year concerts with extraordinary lighting and costumes.
"She usually had a breakdown afterwards and would go to Ashburn Hall for a while. There are two 'madness' scenes in the work."
Stevens made great sacrifices for her art. According to former pupils, she spent every dollar she made on overseas travel to study new dances.
Video projections revisit Stevens' travels to Europe to collect national dances, which she taught her pupils on return. Her quest was to unearth the perfect three-minute competition dance.
A pianist will play Chopin's Etudes Opus 10 during the performance, which was the favoured music in competition dances.
Kilda Northcott, who plays Stevens in Lily, is one of New Zealand's leading contemporary dancers and was a founding member of the Limbs Dance Company and Douglas Wright Dance Company.
Last year, she was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to dance.
Another chance conversation again underlines the depth of Dunedin dance.
"Kilda taught me contemporary dance at WPAC in Wellington," Dunedin writer and Fortune Theatre publicist Louise Moulin recalls.
"She is an icon. A national treasure really.
"One of the things that came out of this is how many people do study dance and how proud they are of their dancing days," Pringle muses.
A microphone will be set up at the end of each show so people can share their own stories about Lily Stevens.
Lily is on at 7pm at the Fortune Theatre from Wednesday until Saturday and at 4pm on Sunday.
• Lily Stevens
Born: 1902
Fell in love with dance: after seeing Anna Pavlova dance in Dunedin, 1926.
Taught: generations of Dunedin dancers.
Awarded: Queen's Service Medal for services to ballet in 1982.
Died: March 28, 1996.
