Rose Philpott was crouched into the back of her seat, rocking and murmuring to herself.
The curtain had just gone up in the Auckland theatre on opening night of the first full-length dance work she has choreographed herself — Dry Spell.
While Philpott knew she liked what she had created and was proud of it, she was full of nerves, sitting in her hometown audience alongside her peers and family, who were about to see the work for the first time.
"My partner had to tell me to stop. It was like watching a thriller or something — everything’s kind of heightened."
Philpott is no stranger to opening nights of her work but in the past it has always been as part of a team.
"You go through that with another person, we make the calls together, but when you are just by yourself , when I saw the poster ‘Dry Spell by Rose Philpott’, it’s like it’s all on me this time."
Four months later and Philpott is much more relaxed about the work. She is excited about its second season, especially given it is quite rare for a dance work to get multiple tours in New Zealand — and even rarer for all the dancers to be available again.
Now she feels as though she has gone through the process of transferring the work to the dancers — Oliver Carruthers, Emma Cosgrave, Veronica ChengEn Lyu, Levi Siaosi and Cecilia Wilcox — for them to make their own.
"There’s a kind of a nice feeling of a shift in responsibility to take their experience of the work and performance to keep it fresh and evolving going into second tour."
Philpott will be watching from afar, as she is in Europe supporting her partner at a film festival premiere, but is secure in the knowledge they have it in hand.
Having performed in the first tour and along with their life experience over the past few months including experiencing Covid-19 for themselves, it will only add to the piece, she says.
"Watching them to be able to have round two of this work will be really exciting. It’s an incredible thing for dancers, allowing them to go really deep into it."
The work is no less relevant now, she says. Covid is still ever-present in daily life just as it was when she developed the first shorter iteration of the work. It was inspired by visual art and film she had seen.
"I was trying to capture the cinematic experience of social interaction and how complex it might be in a stage show where you are dealing with theatricality and set design and costume design, that locates the dancers in recognisable environment to the audience."
Then when it came time to develop her work into a full-length piece, Auckland was coming out of isolation and there were a lot of confronting world events taking place such as the Russia-Ukraine war.
"There was this this kind of apocalyptic vibe — everything was tumbling on to the next thing and we were responding to that within the social and theatrical worlds that we made in the original work."
"It was one of the things I was thinking about a lot. We were out of lockdown but still the reality of what was happening in the world around us, it lay on top of each other, feeding the making of this."
The result is a work combining physical theatre, dance, textile and spatial design with a soundtrack from composer Eden Mulholland.
"It is a peephole through which we see ourselves under the immense pressure of collapse and how the human spirit might resist. Some of us have a drink, some of us dance — I don’t think there is necessarily a right way."
Dry Spell is an important step in Philpott’s career and is something she envisaged doing as a young dancer.
She grew up in Auckland dancing and as a teenager performed in the Pointy Dance Company, which facilitated the dancers making their own work. That experience reinforced her desire to choreograph.
But when she got into the Unitech dance programme, dance took over.
"Along the way in training you get kind of jacked up on dancing and performing."
When she graduated, she continued to get dance work with Foster Group Dance and Footnote but also felt like she did not have any ideas to feed into making dance.
"Dance school is such a full-on experience. You are churning out stuff, then you leave and enter the industry.
It took her about five years of working and travelling, seeing work around the world, doing workshops and performing in other people’s work before she felt ready to take the next step.
"‘It’s terrifying. It is a really vulnerable experience to perform. I’m so deeply nervous so to put work out there for people to look at, intimate ideas and thoughts, for an hour, that people pay to watch and talk about — it is quite big.
"I needed a bit more maturity to be able to do that ... I waited until the urge came."
Together with fellow choreographer Jessie McCall, Philpott has been creating work for their dance theatre company Soft Co for the past five years.
She started to branch out on her own with the 15-minute Night Swim for Footnote.
"At the presentation of that work I had a glass of wine, maybe two glasses of wine, and said to the manager I want to make a longer work on the company, which is quite bold for me."
That resulted in the development of the initial work which ended up leading to Dry Spell.
"At the premiere of that work I did the same thing. I went up to him and said I’d like to make a full-length work and here I am. It’s one of the affirming moments in life to ask for something boldly and it happens. It’s a good practice for me."
Footnote New Zealand Dance general manager Brian Wood says Dry Spell perfectly showcases Footnote’s kaupapa of creating career pathways in dance.
"Footnote is excited to add Dry Spell to our rich history of works that support career pathways for dancers, choreographers and other creative professionals.
It’s our privilege to continue encouraging artistic risks to advance contemporary dance in Aotearoa New Zealand by providing exceptional arts experiences for our diverse audiences."
That work has reinforced the enjoyment Philpott experiences from "being on the outside" watching other people and sharing ideas to create work.
"The ideas are free-flowing and the cool thing is being able to facilitate and shape and push things you’d never have come up with yourself. It’s super collaborative."
It is also challenging as both parties push each other to extend beyond what they already know.
"The dancers are kind of so integral to creative process, their willingness, their own interests, their lineages of movement, their personalities, their humour — it definitely is a work that belongs to all of us, for sure."
"It’s quite cool having that development, that collaborative relationship over long period of time. We have this mutual history to draw on, a short-handing of communication. It’s such a great way to work with a company."
For Philpott, choreography adds another important string to her bow in a career which to be sustainable requires diversity and the ability to continue to make her own work.
"My independent work has mostly been facilitated by Footnote."
She plans to take that work another step further by starting a PhD next year, which she hopes will provide her with more time to create and the financial support to dive deeper into her practice and make more work.
Philpott also teaches and will be teaching choreographic practice at the University of Auckland next year as well as, hopefully, doing more work with McCall.
"There is no sitting still. The hustle never stops."
To see:
Dry Spell, Footnote, Regent Theatre, August 20
