Interview: Lemi Ponifasio, choreographer

SAMOAN choreographer Lemi Ponifasio isn't keen on "explaining" his work. He's not being mysterious, he'd just rather you felt it. And Scottish audiences now have that opportunity ...

• Lemi Ponifasio sees dancing not simply as a performance but as life

IN A theatre in Essen, Germany, an audience is transfixed by a group of men moving together in unison. Wearing black silk sarongs they glide on the stage in tiny steps and rocking movements, their arms waving like semaphore flags, then slapping rhythmically against their bodies.

The timing is perfect, the effect hypnotic. The stage is dimly lit, and now and then a black and white video projection lights the back wall. The image is of a pelican in the surf flapping helplessly, yet defiantly. With images of the ravaged Gulf of Mexico still fresh in our minds, we assume that its wings are clogged with oil.

Birds with Skymirrors is the latest creation of Lemi Ponifasio, the Samoan-born, New Zealand-based choreographer. To be performed with another Ponifasio work, Tempest: Without a Body, at this year's Edinburgh International Festival, Birds is challenging and unexpectedly moving. For two hours the audience is gripped as they watch eight male dancers and three female undulate and writhe, sing and sway. The movements are strange yet familiar and always fascinating.

Sitting with Ponifasio in a hotel dining room the morning after the show, he's a little concerned that I watched the second performance because that's when, he says, you see all the problems that the nerves or excitement of the first night disguised.

"On the first night you just want to make sure it gets on stage," he says. "And that the lights turn on and off." He giggles, something he does a lot.

Birds took root in Ponifasio's mind when he was walking along the beach of the tiny island of Tarawa, capital of the island nation of Kiribati, the easternmost islands in the world, some four years ago. Watching frigate birds overhead, he noticed they had something in their beaks. The "liquid mirrors" he saw turned out to be strips of videotape that the birds had picked up and were using to line their nests. "At first I thought it was really beautiful," he says, "then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. What was I witnessing?"

Ponifasio, a man with a reputation for fearless creativity, was thinking about the end of the world, the notion that humans are simply a part of the earth's processes. The resulting work, part-dance and part-ceremony, is therefore rooted in the real but concerned with something much bigger, something almost spiritual.

Birds' connection to the debate about ecology and the environment is only in the loosest, most metaphorical sense. It is not a performance about climate change.

That said, though, the birds had most likely picked up the shining pieces of plastic tape from the morass of rubbish that swirls across the Pacific, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A pool of rubbish that will not biodegrade, it floats in the centre of a huge ocean current, known as a gyre, and it's now twice the size of Texas. There are five gyres in the world and discarded plastic is building up in all of them. It's estimated that it kills as many as a million seabirds each year and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles.

Aware of the issues, Ponifasio understands why people hold on to descriptions to attach to work as complex as his, but he's still resistant to definitions that, for him, simply don't work.

Refer to Mau, the creative organisation Ponifasio founded in 1995, as a dance company and he'll tell you that it is a "very old idea". He prefers the term community. Ask about the dancers with whom he works, none of whom has had what we would understand as a conventional dance training at a dance or drama school, and he'll explain that where he is from, everyone is expected to dance. "For us to sing, to dance, to conduct ceremonies, it's part of your life. You're expected as a citizen to do that, it's normal, it's a part of growing up. A farmer can dance, a student can dance. None of these people have ever been to dance school, but they are dancers. The dance is created not in a vacuum but in the community."

Quiz him on the practicalities of how his dancers achieve such synchronicity, the hours they must have spent in rehearsal rooms to achieve such perfect timing, and he just smiles. "That's the easy part. If you hang out with our community of people, I never talk about dance, I talk about something else. That's the preparation – engagement in life. It looks like I beat their heads all day, but I promise you I don't do that."

Ponifasio views overblown descriptions on programmes and publicity material with a wry eye.

"I see it this way, just say it's a new development in theatre and it will be clearer and more respectful," he says, sounding weary at having to explain this.

For him it's evidence that in the North we're still wedded to cultural notions that simply don't work for Ponifasio. "You can give it to (Merce] Cunningham or Pina Bausch – why can't you give it to someone from Africa or from Samoa? And that way we can stop continuing this divide, when we don't understand something we say that it's exotic or something ritualistic or ethnic. Contemporary is not about a fashion or about something that looks European, it's about what people are speaking about in that moment in their lives. That's how we do it, that's how I think I do it. Nothing mysterious."

But, of course, there is mystery. In watching contemporary dance many of us do look for meaning. What's it really about? Are we getting it? For Ponifasio the search for meaning can sometimes get in the way of understanding. For him, it's an illustration of a peculiar predicament in which we find ourselves.

"We have a problem being. Just being. It's the second word in our title – human being. But we have a problem with it because in being we are not controlling anything. We've created ourselves a society which is built around spectating or doing, but we are not being."

This means that theatre becomes an act of narcissism, basically we go to the theatre to see ourselves and our own thoughts about the world being reflected. "And then there's no point," says Ponifasio, "because there's no journey, no pilgrimage, no chance of being struck by lightning and God speaking to you." He giggles.

Speaking to Ponifasio, like watching his work, is a slightly jarring experience.

It's pleasurable but it makes you feel a little odd, like you've just had your brain stretched in a direction you weren't sure that it would go. If the work wasn't as strong as it is, Ponifasio's talk of "dismantling control" and "conscious engagement" might sound like posturing, but from where I was sitting in that darkened auditorium, it worked. The dancers' movement was transfixing, the soundscape and occasional song haunting.

Ponifasio may resist the overlaying of contemporary issues on his work, but with both Tempest and Birds, global events have made this impossible.

"It's very strange," he says. "I started working on Tempest and then there was the bombing in London (the July 7 London transport attacks]. Then I went back to New Zealand and an Algerian academic (political asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui] was arrested. The reality of things comes in when you're making work. When I was trying to make Birds there was a big tsunami in Samoa and now this oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico." He shakes his head. "It's good. But it is kind of strange."

Mau is named after the non-violent Samoan independence movement of the early 20th century and Ponifasio's work is deeply rooted in the Pacific cultures. He has referred to his work as the pursuit of the "Va-body", a conscious and responsible state of being. The Va, he explains, is the gap in the rock reef around an island. It's where the islanders' boats come in and go out for fishing or travel and it's the most dangerous part of the ocean.

"This is the point where we should be all the time," he says. "In Samoa we say in the va, that's what politeness is – it means to be in the space, to be paddling on both sides of the canoe, to be in balance. Maintain the space, it's like a motto in Samoa. That's the kind of theatre I'm trying to make, it's about being in the space.

"Our architecture is the same. In a typical Samoan house you have one room and everything is open. Births, deaths, love-making, eating, drinking, sleeping, fighting, discussion takes place in one space so you must learn negotiation. I like this. As opposed to the theatre which is a space of mystery."

Art and activism don't always sit easily together, but it's clear that Ponifasio is interested in changing things with what he creates, whether it's for the dancers who work with him, or the audiences who watch their performance. So what, I ask him, is the purpose of art?

"Don't laugh," he says, "I think it's about beauty and truth. My role as an artist is to cultivate the conditions for beauty and truth to emerge. Art is a second chance for us, a second chance of reflection, of feeling like a human being. I believe in that so much because for the people I work with that is so true for us. This is our second chance – I know that.

"To come to Edinburgh, I don't do that just to show a song and dance, I come to take my second chance. And in a world that doesn't have so many second chances, art is the place for it."

• Tempest: Without a Body, 8pm, 14 and 15 August, The Playhouse. Birds with Skymirrors, 8pm, 17 and 18 August, The Playhouse as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. For information and tickets log on to www.eif.co.uk

Birds' connection to the debate about ecology and the environment is only in the loosest, most metaphorical sense. It is not a performance about climate change. That said, though, the birds had most likely picked up the shining pieces of plastic tape from the morass of rubbish that swirls across the Pacific, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A pool of rubbish that will not biodegrade, it floats in the centre of a huge ocean current, known as a gyre, and it's now twice the size of Texas. There are five gyres in the world and discarded plastic is building up in all of them. It's estimated that it kills as many as a million seabirds each year and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles.

Aware of the issues, Ponifasio understands why people hold on to descriptions to attach to work as complex as his, but he's still resistant to definitions that, for him, simply don't work.

Refer to Mau, the creative organisation Ponifasio founded in 1995, as a dance company and he'll tell you that it is a "very old idea". He prefers the term community. Ask about the dancers with whom he works, none of whom has had what we would understand as a conventional dance training at a dance or drama school, and he'll explain that where he is from, everyone is expected to dance. "For us to sing, to dance, to conduct ceremonies, it's part of your life. You're expected as a citizen to do that, it's normal, it's a part of growing up. A farmer can dance, a student can dance. None of these people have ever been to dance school, but they are dancers. The dance is created not in a vacuum but in the community."

Quiz him on the practicalities of how his dancers achieve such synchronicity, the hours they must have spent in rehearsal rooms to achieve such perfect timing, and he just smiles. "That's the easy part. If you hang out with our community of people, I never talk about dance, I talk about something else. That's the preparation - engagement in life. It looks like I beat their heads all day, but I promise you I don't do that."

Ponifasio views overblown descriptions on programmes and publicity material with a wry eye.

"I see it this way, just say it's a new development in theatre and it will be clearer and more respectful," he says, sounding weary at having to explain this. For him it's evidence that in the North we're still wedded to cultural notions that simply don't work for Ponifasio. "You can give it to [Merce] Cunningham or Pina Bausch - why can't you give it to someone from Africa or from Samoa? And that way we can stop continuing this divide, when we don't understand something we say that it's exotic or something ritualistic or ethnic. Contemporary is not about a fashion or about something that looks European, it's about what people are speaking about in that moment in their lives. That's how we do it, that's how I think I do it. Nothing mysterious."

But, of course, there is mystery. In watching contemporary dance many of us do look for meaning. What's it really about? Are we getting it? For Ponifasio the search for meaning can sometimes get in the way of understanding. For him, it's an illustration of a peculiar predicament in which we find ourselves.

"We have a problem being. Just being. It's the second word in our title - human being. But we have a problem with it because in being we are not controlling anything. We've created ourselves a society which is built around spectating or doing, but we are not being."

This means that theatre becomes an act of narcissism, basically we go to the theatre to see ourselves and our own thoughts about the world being reflected. "And then there's no point," says Ponifasio, "because there's no journey, no pilgrimage, no chance of being struck by lightning and God speaking to you." He giggles.

Speaking to Ponifasio, like watching his work, is a slightly jarring experience. It's pleasurable but it makes you feel a little odd, like you've just had your brain stretched in a direction you weren't sure that it would go. If the work wasn't as strong as it is, Ponifasio's talk of "dismantling control" and "conscious engagement" might sound like posturing, but from where I was sitting in that darkened auditorium, it worked. The dancers' movement was transfixing, the soundscape and occasional song haunting.

Ponifasio may resist the overlaying of contemporary issues on his work, but with both Tempest and Birds, global events have made this impossible.

"It's very strange," he says. "I started working on Tempest and then there was the bombing in London [the July 7 London transport attacks]. Then I went back to New Zealand and an Algerian academic [political asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui] was arrested. The reality of things comes in when you're making work. When I was trying to make Birds there was a big tsunami in Samoa and now this oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico." He shakes his head. "It's good. But it is kind of strange."

Mau is named after the non-violent Samoan independence movement of the early 20th century and Ponifasio's work is deeply rooted in the Pacific cultures. He has referred to his work as the pursuit of the "Va-body", a conscious and responsible state of being. The Va, he explains, is the gap in the rock reef around an island. It's where the islanders' boats come in and go out for fishing or travel and it's the most dangerous part of the ocean.

"This is the point where we should be all the time," he says. "In Samoa we say in the va, that's what politeness is - it means to be in the space, to be paddling on both sides of the canoe, to be in balance. Maintain the space, it's like a motto in Samoa. That's the kind of theatre I'm trying to make, it's about being in the space.

"Our architecture is the same. In a typical Samoan house you have one room and everything is open. Births, deaths, love-making, eating, drinking, sleeping, fighting, discussion takes place in one space so you must learn negotiation. I like this. As opposed to the theatre which is a space of mystery."

Art and activism don't always sit easily together, but it's clear that Ponifasio is interested in changing things with what he creates, whether it's for the dancers who work with him, or the audiences who watch their performance. So what, I ask him, is the purpose of art?

"Don't laugh," he says, "I think it's about beauty and truth. My role as an artist is to cultivate the conditions for beauty and truth to emerge. Art is a second chance for us, a second chance of reflection, of feeling like a human being. I believe in that so much because for the people I work with that is so true for us. This is our second chance - I know that.

"To come to Edinburgh, I don't do that just to show a song and dance, I come to take my second chance. And in a world that doesn't have so many second chances, art is the place for it."

Tempest: Without a Body, 8pm, 14 and 15 August, The Playhouse. Birds with Skymirrors, 8pm, 17 and 18 August, The Playhouse as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. For information and tickets log on to www.eif.co.uk

samoan CHOREOGRAPHER lemi ponifasio isn't keen on ‘explaining' his work. he's not being mysterious, he'd just rather you felt it. and scottish audiences NOW HAVE THAT OPPORTUNITY