Courtesy of Campbell Live - TV3 2005-10-26

Presenter (John Campbell ): Michael Parmenter is a walking, talking, leaping, prancing, dancing miracle. He's over 50, he's HIV positive, he's a cancer survivor and he's bloody energetic. The choreographer's just been awarded a $65,000 grant from Creative New Zealand to come up with a new dance work. Courtesy of Campbell Live - TV3 2005-10-26

Presenter (John Campbell ): Michael Parmenter is a walking, talking, leaping, prancing, dancing miracle. He's over 50, he's HIV positive, he's a cancer survivor and he's bloody energetic. The choreographer's just been awarded a $65,000 grant from Creative New Zealand to come up with a new dance work.Well in tonight's View From Here we asked him the $65,000 question, how's he going to spend the money?

Michael Parmenter (Choreographer): I started dancing about 30 years ago and as I took my first dance class when I was about 22 or 3 that makes me over 50 which is probably quite old as contemporary dancers go. Over the years I've made - gosh nearly about 60 pieces. Earlier this year I had a big Retrospective, I got about 18 dancers together, some of my favourite dancers from overseas, and we put together a programme which we toured from Auckland to Dunedin, it was a huge success. It was so great having all my old friends, these dancers, back in New Zealand. I had this idea that what I want to do is explore animal movement to just get back to the body rather than starting with some narrative or a story or something 'cause most of my works are very sort of dramatic I s'pose, they have a story or a narrative structure and then I find movement to go with that narrative. I've just got this choreographic fellowship from Creative New Zealand, $65,000 to let me workshop for a year to buy a video camera, get into the studio, improvise with movement, employ dancers for a few weeks here and another few weeks there and gradually over a year to put together the material that will enable me to create a new work. One of the things that I've always been very frustrated about dance in New Zealand is that you have to choreograph in the - like the six weeks just before the performance goes on. You get your dancers, posters are being printed and the theatre's been booked and you've got six weeks and at the end of that you've got this performance, hard luck if the muse isn't with you for those six weeks, you're stuffed. One of the things that happens most overseas is that dancers and choreographers take a whole year to create a piece. They're performing one work and touring around Europe and then while they're doing that they're creating a new work. So one of the things that I love about this fellowship is that I get an opportunity to spend a whole year to make a new work which is sort of like how creativity works €”it takes time, it's like making a pot you can't do it in half a hour you have to spend a long long time on it. So over the next year I'm going to be coming into the studio, something like this, just spending time improvising, making movement and then for a period of time I'll grab some dancers together and we'll workshop together and by the end of it, by hopefully Christmas time next year I'll have a huge amount of material and what I want to do is to allow narrative or story to sort of ooze out of that material so that I'll be able to create a new piece.

Presenter: The remarkable Michael Parmenter.

ENDS