Reinga to Leina: Ghost - Dancing Leylines

Abstract

 In this essay I evoke ghostly remnants of my choreographic research practices^[1] facilitated via a series of global inter-disciplinary collaborations in Hawaii^[2] and California^[3] bridging Māori cosmologies and epistemological frame works with inter-cultural collectives^[4]. Reconstructing diary, email and interview material^[5] offers a unique creative insight into contemporary Maori performing art practices, re-experiencing the presentness of time, as intimately informed by an erased other, where the former recipient now becomes the medium, the ghost reader.  This essay mirrors the creative processes, tracing moments, already lived, to dance the intangible spirit across leylines of transitional space^[6].

^[1]     Cultural interventions within community spaces of exchange such as public singing lessons, group visits to sites, performative explorations, community sleepovers.

^[2]     Work was undertaken at The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum during a seven week artist residency in 2013

^[3]     Work was undertaken as a guest choreographer in residence at University of California Berkeley for the Berkeley Dance Project in 2014 and as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Riverside during Spring Quarter 2014

^[4]     I am a founding member of Atamira Dance Company and was involved in the collaboration of the Whare Tapere by Charles Royal and Louise Potiki Bryant

^[5]     I have used my emails as a source material to reflect the nature of fragmentary knowledge and cultural revitalisation, a major part of the Whare Tapere as a research archive

^[6]     Local Maori tribes hold various sources of story that relate to Cape Reinga or Rerenga Wairua as a spiritual highway. These leylines are echoed throughout the world, in places I have travelled such as Hawaii and New Mexico.