Dancing Dolphins: Approaches to Eco-Arts and Community Dance

New Zealand's Soul Speed Activist Theatre and Dance Troupe

Popoto or Maui’s Dolphins are endangered dolphins found in New Zealand waters: There are only about 110 Maui’s Dolphins left. The most significant dangers are entanglement in fishing nets and by-catch (being caught in fishing gear meant for other species). But other human activities are also a target in current conservation efforts.

In 2005, a group of activists found a powerful way to bring attention to an additional danger disrupting the dolphin’s life: invasive research methods. These activists co-habit the coastal area where the dolphins live, Whaingaroa Raglan on New Zealand’s North Island. Most of the activists are parents, and they want their children to grow up with the dolphins in their shared future of humans, nonhumans and the land. Many are involved with the Whaingaroa Environment Centre. To protest the research actions, they created a dance.

Making and Dancing "Popoto Whakamiharo"

Choreographer Ardre Foote is Maori, and she finds that this background not only influences her relation to the land, but also her way of dealing with community dance: “Finding the dancers was easy, as most of my friends and co-workers love to dance. I also wanted to do something with mothers in our community who may have danced a lot in their youth but since having children thought they didn’t have the time or talent.” The dancers were Patti, who teaches dance to children in the community; Te Kahurangi, a weaver and full-time mother; Heleina, a full-time mother of four children; Amy, a U.S. citizen who has lived in Raglan for three years; Antonio, a father and an actor who commutes to Auckland three days a week working for Maori TV; and Te Rawhitiroa, who is 18 and who works for Te Mauri Tau, an educational, environmental, health and community trust.

In 12 performance presentations at local sites and at events such as Eco-Reggae in Raglan, WOMAD 2005 and at the marae (Maori meeting place) at Te Papa museum in Wellington, Soul Speed Activist Theatre and Dance Troupe presented "Popoto Whakamiharo." The performers created a web of connection, attempting to bring audiences into a shared space of ecological connection and responsibility. In the performance, the dancers, choreographed by Ardre Foote, unwind soft muslin cords from a central pole and hand these strings to audience members. Within this web, dancers weave, taking their movement vocabulary from careful observation of dolphin movement. Scientists (rather stereotyped in white jackets and laptops) interrupt the dance and attach a box to the arm of a dancer. The box disrupts the dancer’s movement until she frees herself.

Ardre Foote: "I choreographed the piece around the story of the Popoto dolphin and its life in the sea, imagining it living freely and in harmony with its surroundings, expressing love and joy and portraying the connection and love that it wants to share with us, and then our [human] hunger for more, which was portrayed by the scientists and the need for more information.”

During the performance, the dancers plead with the audience to hold on to their strings: "Don’t let go – it’s in your hands." The performance echoes beyond its own space and time: Audience members are invited to send messages to the government on special postcards provided, and members of the scientific community provided supportive statements addressing the need to change research methods.

Science Accesses the Power of Dance

Marine-mammal biologist Liz Slooten provided the scientific impetus behind the project. In an interview, Slooten explained how, up until a few years ago, visual, photographic and acoustic research were the dominant methods of dolphin observation. Recently, some researchers have started using biopsy darts and catching dolphins to apply tags by drilling holes in the dorsal fins.

Soul Speed Activist Theatre and Dance Troupe

Slooten and fellow conservationist Mary Gardner discussed ways of reaching the general public with the problems generated by this invasive research. What if somebody came up with a dance?

Slooten and her research partner Steve Dawson are well known for their innovative and effective communication methods, and in 2004, they received the Charles Fleming Award for their contribution to conservation science. Slooten explained how scientific information is usually distributed by reading and writing, talking and listening. She is deeply interested in finding other ways of exchanging ideas. She was impressed with "Popoto Whakamiharo," with the power of dance as a form of communication about ethical and ecological aspects of conservation policies and with the evocative nature and accuracy with which the performers captured the dolphins’ movements in their dance.

Choreographer Ardre Foote explains some of the alternative research processes specific to her background and her understanding of dance that have made this accuracy possible. As a New Zealander, she has often swum with dolphins. About influences on the choreographic process, she explains: “I was having a lot of dreams of swimming with dolphins, which really helped tremendously with feeling movements and dancing them out.” And the dance itself brought the experience full circle: the end of one of the performances taking place on a beach, said Foote, the dancers ran into the sea. There the silk costumes clung to them, creating sensations and experiences of a having a different skin, an experience she describes as magical.

Slooten laughs while she explains how, for many people, the idea of a political performance about dolphin-conservation issues evokes images of strong, didactic protest actions – actions that might include a wooden dolphin and a hand drill. What she likes about the methods employed by Mary Gardner, Ardre Foote and the community dance team, she says, is dance creation as an interactive, collaborative activity. She likens the dance work to patterns in ecological thought: Nothing is linear, there is not one chain of command, there is an awareness of other people and their needs.

Community Dance Reverberates

"Popoto Whakamiharo" provided an insight into the possibilities for exciting science-art collaboration, and its actions continue to reverberate: The activists and community artists presented to the New Zealand government the postcards written as part of the performance, as well as statements by researchers and concrete suggestions for change. They are now engaged in an ongoing dialogue that they hope will mean change for the dolphin population.

Foote and her Whaingaroa dancers continue making work in response to environmental issues that members of the community feel strongly about, and the group’s new project focuses on the end of the moratorium on whale hunting, and its effects on New Zealand waters.

Petra Kuppers is the Caroline Plummer Fellow in Community Dance at the University of Otago, New Zealand. As part of her fellowship, she creates performance and photography work with people in a local hospice, runs story-movement exchanges in the Public Library and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and organizes "Dance with a Difference" workshops for people who experience pain and fatigue. She is at work on a manuscript, "Community Performance: An Introduction," and she is co-editing "Community Performance: A Reader" with Gwen Robertson (both books, Routledge, 2007). Back in the U.S., she is an associate professor of performance studies at Bryant University, and author of "Disability and Contemporary Performance" (Routledge, 2003) and "Bodily Fantasies: Medical Visions/Medical Performances" (Minnesota, forthcoming 2006).

Original CAN/API publication: September 2005