Dance
War stories
by Francesca Horsley
The camaraderie of wartime songs, sweltering heat and desert flies, and the longing for a sweetheart, are captured by the dance theatre work Memoirs of Active Service. Atamira Dance Collective have a history of powerful, emotional works that draw directly on their whakapapa. Choreographer Maaka Pepene has continued this strong tradition. Largely based on the WWII diary of his grandfather Jack, who served in the 28th Maori Battalion, the work is as much a narrative about love as it is about war.
Three brothers, danced by Sean MacDonald, Jack Gray and Peter Takapuna, begin with a sense of adventure, as they leave their rural community for action in North Africa. The story is told in dance episodes and narrated extracts from the diary. Addressed to his beloved wife, Jack’s simple and elegant prose masks the traumas of war. The entries, with original script projected in video montage onto a screen, concentrate on friendship, escapades, weather and food.
Pepene’s choreography, wonderfully realised by five dancers, has a stylised 1940s feel. Each intense interlude appears as a wartime snapshot from a vintage newsreel or movie. The farewell duet between husband, MacDonald, and wife, Justine Hohaia, hints at Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, with twirling lifts and tender embraces.
The men’s free-wheeling bodies are honed in an impressive drill, no doubt informed by Pepene’s six years in the NZ Infantry. The movement, together with soundscore by Paddy Free, creates telling images. The brothers lie immobile in the heat or crawl with hallucinogenic tension on night-time raids; stand in the bitter cold, numbed; spin, haunted by mounting casualties. The battalion’s legendary fierceness is encapsulated in slow-motion haka.
The women, Hohaia and Kelly Nash, initially fret around the radio for accounts of the battalion, but not for long. In headscarves, they dance a quirky number to Gracie Fields, and in a snappy routine depart for the Navy.
As the action intensifies in Italy, so does Jack’s longing for his wife, her image becoming a talisman, vividly masking the horror and fear.
The finale, an elegiac ensemble set to Albinoni, captures loss, continuation and community. Pepene has always impressed with his fine dancing. Now, as choreographer, he reveals an assurance and dramatic talent that holds much promise.
MEMOIRS OF ACTIVE SERVICE, Atamira Dance Collective, Auckland.
