Dancing Stories: A Community Dance Residency in a Hospice in New Zealand

Canoes forging through cold waters, mountains rising from the sea, a heart beating under a mountain lake, an albatross sailing toward the Antarctic: these were the story-images of Coastal Mappings, a large-scale community project set in and around Dunedin, New Zealand. In the Coastal Mappings performance project, people in the last months of their lives joined cancer survivors, family members and other interested people in explorations of Pakeha myths (by European-settler descendents) and Maori myths (by descendents of the crews of the first canoes, first inhabitants of New Zealand). Together, we created personal landscapes through movement, storytelling, photography and video. In this essay, I discuss some of the opportunities, challenges and experiences of leading a community dance project in an intercultural social environment, and with people whose relationship to their environment is different from mine.