Carol Brown on Aarero Stone
New Zealand Contemporary Dance performance Aarero Stone opens at the New Zealand International Arts Festival next weekend. Consisting of two solo performances, the show draws on mythologies of transformation and examines their significance today. Set against a landscape designed by Dorita Hanna, performance artist Charles Koroneho and London-based Carol Brown will offer audiences two highly individual performances. KIRAN CHUG asks Carol Brown to take us inside her world of dance.
Aarero Stone is an interesting project and an exciting collaboration between yourself, Dorita Hannah and Charles Koroneho, how did it come about?
We did a workshop for this project in 2004 and it was actually going to be a much bigger work. We were going to have eight dancers and three live musicians but we didn’t get the funding – it was a very large ambition. Then I met with Carla Van Zon and she was really interested in developing this collaboration / relationship between Charles, Dorita and myself, and also in all the research that we had done for this project. From there, it became distilled into these two inter-related solos that Charles and I are performing here at the Festival.
The choreography draws on mythologies ranging from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to ancient Maori tales, how far do these actually influence your performance?
One of the wonderful things about being a performance artist is having the body as a medium, rather than text. You can slip through and shift through these different imageries and I use stories as ways of orientating myself in the work. I got really interested in myths about metamorphoses a couple of years ago as I was doing a lot of work with the media. It feels like metamorphosis is very current to the way we are looking at the body as a ‘shape shift’. I was also interested in what that meant in terms of state, for instance, and the stories I got very interested in were kind of against the natural order of things. Flesh to stone, for example, is the metamorphosis that you see in a lot of world mythologies, certainly in Greek and Roman mythology.
I drew on the story of Sybil the Enchantress, and the myth of Niobe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who, on the loss of her fourteen children, turns to stone. The interesting thing about these myths is that they keep changing their meaning in different times and different eras. Something that is happening in the UK at the moment is a lot of people are drawing on myth to talk about contemporary situations and look at how an ancient and archaic story can have a contemporary resonance. So the story of a woman being turned to stone in her grief was a sort of way of expressing the idea of lamentation in a time of terror. It is also interesting to look at how the media portrays women grieving for the loss of their children. We looked at the photographs of the mothers from Beslam and how their faces literally turn to stone in shock and horror. So, the Niobe myth became a way to talk about and embody that.
As for Sybil, she makes a deal with Apollo and says if you give me as many years as there are grains of sand on the beach, I will stay a virgin. However, her body shrinks over time and she becomes merely a voice that lives in a cave. In the middle ages there is developed this idea that she was an enchantress, a witch, so they covered up the entrance to the cave with stone so she couldn’t escape. So here, again, is the idea of a woman speaking through stone.
Of course in Maori ancestral stories there are many stories of ancestors who are embedded in stone and in many ways the landscape of New Zealand makes this unsurprising. There is a well known sandstone woman in Rotorua who turns herself into stone, almost in self sacrifice and to perform a positive function as opposed to the European stories where the women were often turned to stone in punishment. In Hindu mythology, again, it is a kind of celebration rather than a punishment to change form.
I was really interested in those cultural differences and how these trans-global stories have very different resonances.
Stone is aligned with lifelessness, how far are you able to portray this idea in dance?
Stone is the opposite of what people consider the dancing body to be – which is very much about being lively. One of the things you are looking for as a performing artist is going against the grain of what is natural to you and finding what might seem unnatural, such as being incredibly still.
We think stone is still but stony landscape is shifting and moving, it is just shifting in a different time, a time of geology. I went to Australia last year and I found these organic material living ‘stones’. They are single cell organisms, millions of years old and they are growing one millimetre a year. I was interested in those border forms that are not quite flesh and not quite stone. There are, you see, states between organic biological material and mineral, where, (as we are finding out more and more at the level of particles and things) there is this ongoing growth.
In New Zealand that has a very strong resonance because the landscape is so powerful and it moves. Here, it cracks and it breaks and the very geology of the place lets you know it is alive.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the performance?
What is wonderful for the audience is that they have this opportunity to make this mix of these two artists who are both performing in this very extraordinary space which Dorita Hannah has designed, which involves a wall, a series of reflections, and a grid of marked out landscapes where there are forms that we interact with in different ways. Charles and I both interpret that landscape in very different ways and embody it in totally differently and, in a way, the audience has an opportunity to mix these two different perspectives and create their own in view of that. What happens is you have these two journeys in a landscape which is continuous, but which is affected differently by these two performers and how they interpret and embody that landscape Aarero, of course, means tongue and so Aarero Stone is about a speaking landscape and the stories that we bring to place.
I brought these European stories and was interested in seeing how they would resonate here, whilst Charles is very much located here as a New Zealand Maori. So, I think there is something very global and very local about it. Definitely, though, it is a very New Zealand work.
See also:
» Aarero Stone: Two Solos in a Performance Landscape (Review)
» Aarero Stone @ NZ International Arts Festival
Aarero Stone is an interesting project and an exciting collaboration between yourself, Dorita Hannah and Charles Koroneho, how did it come about?
We did a workshop for this project in 2004 and it was actually going to be a much bigger work. We were going to have eight dancers and three live musicians but we didn’t get the funding – it was a very large ambition. Then I met with Carla Van Zon and she was really interested in developing this collaboration / relationship between Charles, Dorita and myself, and also in all the research that we had done for this project. From there, it became distilled into these two inter-related solos that Charles and I are performing here at the Festival.
The choreography draws on mythologies ranging from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to ancient Maori tales, how far do these actually influence your performance?
One of the wonderful things about being a performance artist is having the body as a medium, rather than text. You can slip through and shift through these different imageries and I use stories as ways of orientating myself in the work. I got really interested in myths about metamorphoses a couple of years ago as I was doing a lot of work with the media. It feels like metamorphosis is very current to the way we are looking at the body as a ‘shape shift’. I was also interested in what that meant in terms of state, for instance, and the stories I got very interested in were kind of against the natural order of things. Flesh to stone, for example, is the metamorphosis that you see in a lot of world mythologies, certainly in Greek and Roman mythology.
I drew on the story of Sybil the Enchantress, and the myth of Niobe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who, on the loss of her fourteen children, turns to stone. The interesting thing about these myths is that they keep changing their meaning in different times and different eras. Something that is happening in the UK at the moment is a lot of people are drawing on myth to talk about contemporary situations and look at how an ancient and archaic story can have a contemporary resonance. So the story of a woman being turned to stone in her grief was a sort of way of expressing the idea of lamentation in a time of terror. It is also interesting to look at how the media portrays women grieving for the loss of their children. We looked at the photographs of the mothers from Beslam and how their faces literally turn to stone in shock and horror. So, the Niobe myth became a way to talk about and embody that.
As for Sybil, she makes a deal with Apollo and says if you give me as many years as there are grains of sand on the beach, I will stay a virgin. However, her body shrinks over time and she becomes merely a voice that lives in a cave. In the middle ages there is developed this idea that she was an enchantress, a witch, so they covered up the entrance to the cave with stone so she couldn’t escape. So here, again, is the idea of a woman speaking through stone.
Of course in Maori ancestral stories there are many stories of ancestors who are embedded in stone and in many ways the landscape of New Zealand makes this unsurprising. There is a well known sandstone woman in Rotorua who turns herself into stone, almost in self sacrifice and to perform a positive function as opposed to the European stories where the women were often turned to stone in punishment. In Hindu mythology, again, it is a kind of celebration rather than a punishment to change form.
I was really interested in those cultural differences and how these trans-global stories have very different resonances.
Stone is aligned with lifelessness, how far are you able to portray this idea in dance?
Stone is the opposite of what people consider the dancing body to be – which is very much about being lively. One of the things you are looking for as a performing artist is going against the grain of what is natural to you and finding what might seem unnatural, such as being incredibly still.
We think stone is still but stony landscape is shifting and moving, it is just shifting in a different time, a time of geology. I went to Australia last year and I found these organic material living ‘stones’. They are single cell organisms, millions of years old and they are growing one millimetre a year. I was interested in those border forms that are not quite flesh and not quite stone. There are, you see, states between organic biological material and mineral, where, (as we are finding out more and more at the level of particles and things) there is this ongoing growth.
In New Zealand that has a very strong resonance because the landscape is so powerful and it moves. Here, it cracks and it breaks and the very geology of the place lets you know it is alive.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the performance?
What is wonderful for the audience is that they have this opportunity to make this mix of these two artists who are both performing in this very extraordinary space which Dorita Hannah has designed, which involves a wall, a series of reflections, and a grid of marked out landscapes where there are forms that we interact with in different ways. Charles and I both interpret that landscape in very different ways and embody it in totally differently and, in a way, the audience has an opportunity to mix these two different perspectives and create their own in view of that. What happens is you have these two journeys in a landscape which is continuous, but which is affected differently by these two performers and how they interpret and embody that landscape Aarero, of course, means tongue and so Aarero Stone is about a speaking landscape and the stories that we bring to place.
I brought these European stories and was interested in seeing how they would resonate here, whilst Charles is very much located here as a New Zealand Maori. So, I think there is something very global and very local about it. Definitely, though, it is a very New Zealand work.
See also:
» Aarero Stone: Two Solos in a Performance Landscape (Review)
» Aarero Stone @ NZ International Arts Festival
Comprising two solo performances, Aarero Stone is an interdisciplinary collaboration between choreographer Carol Brown, performance artist Charles Koroneho and designer Dorita Hannah. Originally from Dunedin, London-based Carol Brown is a choreographer, dancer and writer. Her company, Carol Brown Dances, has performed around the world and is renowned for innovative collaborations with visual artists, photographers, digital artists, filmmakers, architects and composers....[Read More]
