Carriageworks will be presenting the Australian premiere of MAU’s Birds with Skymirrors in May. Dance Australia spoke to choreographer Lemi Ponifasio to find out why this contemporary dance work is making waves globally.
Out of context, the title Birds with Skymirrors sounds almost whimsical. Talking to the creator of the work, Lemi Ponifasio, however, it is clear that there’s a lot more to the title than sounding poetic. “The title of the piece came from me watching birds in the sky [above the Pacific Island of Tarawa] with video tapes in their mouths, video tapes which come from the beaches polluted by plastic and all kinds of toxic stuff floating around in the Pacific Ocean, coming from Asia, America, Europe,” says the Samoan choreographer.
Ponifasio is the artistic director of New Zealand-based company, MAU, which he established in 1995. “MAU is the Samoan word meaning my opinion or my truth, elaborates Ponifasio. “It is me asking, ‘What is my perspective? What is my dance? What is my own self-government? What does one care about?’”
That question of ‘what does one care about?’ is of particular importance to Ponifasio. “I welcome [to MAU] those who risk their lives in their rebellion, in their activism, those who risk their lives for their beliefs or risk their life just to feed their families. We must have a need to dance,” he comments. It’s no surprise, then, to discover that that Ponifasio has a history of presenting works that address contemporary issues, and Birds with Skymirrors is no exception. As aforementioned, the title of the work references the pollution that Ponifasio has observed in islands of the Pacific. “The urgency to create Birds With Skymirrors was because many of the communities that make up MAU come from low lying atolls in the Pacific and their homelands are already affected by rising tides,” Ponifasio explains. “I wanted to find out how to write a poem to intensify and bring closer my feeling with them, something like empathy. Most of the performers in this work come from these tiny islands that may not be around for too long.”
Birds with Skymirrors comes to Sydney as part of a tour of international festivals and arts centres in Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland and Spain. The work has received critical acclaim, with the Guardian (UK) describing it has “Physically extraordinary and imaginatively charged, embracing a global view of the world and our place in it.”
Birds with Skymirrors plays Carriageworks, 1-4 May.
www.carriageworks.com.au
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