Douglas Wright's Gloria revived
Co3, Perth's contemporary dance company, is about to bring a much hallowed work back to life.
The late choreographer Douglas Wright was a uniquely gifted artist. He was not only a superb dancer and gifted choreographer, he also drew like Cocteau and wrote like an angel. If he had not been born in New Zealand, so far away from the (so-called) centres of contemporary dance, he might have been world famous. On the other hand it is impossible to imagine such an original talent as his emerging from anywhere else. Like his idol, the author Janet Frame, he was vulnerable and sensitive but he was also bold and mercurial, living life to sometimes reckless extremes.
By the time he died in 2018 aged 62, he had earned the undying respect and devotion of NZ's arts community. He was bestowed with a NZ Order of Merit and an Arts Laureate. His influence went deep. He created about 30 dances for his own Douglas Wright Dance Company, established in 1989, which was the birthing ground for many of NZ's current dance artists.
One of those in the company was compatriot Raewyn Hill, who is now the artistic director of Co3 in Perth and herself a respected director and choreographer. Her next project for Co3 is the revival of one of Wright's most sacred (in both respects of the word) creations - Gloria.
Gloria, to Vivaldi's choral work of the same name, premiered in 1990 and is an ecstatic evocation of the cycle of life, from birth to death and birth again. "It embodies everything, it's life and death and everything in between," Hill says. "There's sort of nothing more to say about it. It brings existence to life, it's painful and beautiful and heavenly."
At the time he created Gloria, Wright had stared death in the face, having not long before received a diagnosis of HIV and witnessed the premature death of some of his friends to the disease, which at that time was running rampant. In Gloria, bare-foot and clad in loose, yellow garments decorated with a rose and skull motif, the dancers depict innocence and joy, sex and death, all to some of the most sublimely melodic music ever written.
Hill saw the premiere of Gloria when she was a student at the New Zealand School of Dance and later performed in it with his company in 1996. Dancing it, she remembers, required enormous endurance, “physically you are pushed to an extreme". Now she speculates how much the experience has informed her own creative drive: “I have that endurance quality that I search for constantly: endurance physically and psychologically.”
She was deeply affected by Gloria. "I remember so much about that work: It changes you as a dancer, it changes you as an audience member."
Now she would like to gift that experience on to the next generation.
Although Gloria has been performed in Australia before (by Sydney Dance Company and Chrissie Parrott Dance Collective), it will be the first time it has been performed since Wright died. Amazingly, it will be the first time in its history to be performed with live music. The 10 dancers of Co3 are joining forces with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and the 16 voices of St George’s Cathedral Consort. With such an gathering of elements, it promises to be a truly “glorious” experience.
Watching a Youtube video of the Douglas Wright company, it is daunting to realise that many of the Co3 dancers would not even have been born when it was created. Hill is intrigued to see how the younger generation will embody the work. Hill is a passionate advocate of "honouring legacy", and says that every decision she makes as artistic director takes into consideration the importance of joining the past with the present. She routinely employs intergenerational casts. For this Gloria, she has called on Claudia Alessi, now in her 50s, who performed in the Chrissie Parrott season in 1993, and Sean MacDonald, who was in the same ensemble as Hill when she performed the work.
In addition to staging Gloria, Hill is also creating a solo work for herself to precede the main work. This too will involve a cross generational communication - she will make the solo first on the dancers in Link, WAAPA's graduate company. Her inspiration is a book called Body Talk, by social scientist Desmond Morris, which identifies 600 universal human gestures.
- KAREN VAN ULZEN
'Gloria" will be performed at the Heath Ledger State Theatre from September 14 to 18. For more info, go here.
