spinning sun dance company

Articles about Queen Camel (2003)

Dance: The mental, physical and emotional isolation of immigration is explored
by Bernadette Rae, NZ Herald

Who is this Queen Camel who lends her name to the new contemporary dance work from choreographer Ann Dewey? (And yes it is "camel", as in large, desert-dwelling quadruped, and not "cam-mel" as some are preferring to say.)

"Aha," says Dewey, small and blonde, English-born, world-travelled, a favourite dancer of Douglas Wright, especially in Forever. "That is the question."

Queen Camel is not the name of a person, but of a village near a hill in England, called Camelot, and thought to be the site of Camelot - the Camelot of myth and magic and holy grails. Dewey's guru, Mata Yogananda, has a meditation centre there.

"And it is a name that begs the question," says Dewey, "of who am I? What is my identity? Where is my sense of place?"

Dewey and company performed in the hall of the Queen Camel meditation centre when they toured her previous work, Nine Daisies, last year. That work was designed to be performed in gardens large and small, private, public, grand or ordinary. But in Queen Camel it was performed in a hall, with a little stage and peculiar lighting, and the performance got slightly out of hand - the company felt disoriented, displaced.

The name stuck, as a title for a new work that was already in Dewey's head, about immigration and refugees, of people being displaced in their lives.

Dewey had become a New Zealand citizen in 2001, after living here for 13 years, and wider issues of immigration can hardly be ignored in the daily dialogue.

"So I look at all that in my Queen Camel," she says, "in a funny, abstract way. I find metaphors for the mental, physical and emotional isolation, for the strangeness of arriving somewhere new and for the feeling of being overawed by a new place. And there are quite a few veiled references to Queen Camel."

Dewey's past work has been noted for its lyricism, with a fast and rhythmic element in counterpoint.

She says there is a lot of humour in Queen Camel as well, some dance theatre movements and a flirtation with the hysterical.

The work is set to an original score from John Gibson; he and Dewey worked in close collaboration to produce movement and music that speaks of the immigration experience.

Dewey is familiar with the feelings that accompany moving homes: her father was a geologist and the family was constantly relocating around the globe. She has spent almost equal portions of her life, so far, in England, America and New Zealand. She danced children's roles, as a girl, in performances by the New York City Ballet, went to the National School of Ballet in Toronto at 13, and made the connection with contemporary dance at the Rambert Academy in London, later performing with Ballet Rambert, the touring company Janet Smith & Dancers and DV8 Physical Theatre, before coming to New Zealand and working with Douglas Wright, Michael Parmenter and Shona McCullagh.

She reckons she knows as well as anybody the difficulties of immigration.

"Unless you have experienced it you have no idea what it is like," she says. "It can be very difficult but it can also be very freeing. You can go into a state of heightened consciousness, just being in a place that is different."

Queen Camel looks at both ends of the experience and comes up with a surprise ending that also contains a resolution.

Queen Camel plays at the Concert Chamber in the Town Hall, a significant venue, says Dewey, because many new New Zealanders take their oath of citizenship there.

A Sense of Belonging
by Marianne Schultz, City Mix

Inventive chorerogrpaher Ann Dewy offers a thought-provoking dance based on identity and citizenship.
British-born Ann Dewey’s ‘Queen Camel’ is a contemporary dance-theatre work full of imagery and contextual sounds. Working alongside composer John Gibson, Dewey has created a hidden narrative which delves into the world of individuality and community.

The performance brings together a cast of six strong dancers, each chosen because of their unique quirks and qualities. Instead of working towards a unity os style, as in most dance works, in ‘Queen Camel’ Dewey ‘uses the dancers’ individual way of moving’.

Queen Camel is also the site of a mediation centre in an English village which Dewey has visited often. It was here, in 2000, that she performed her last work ‘Nine Daisies’. But as Dewey explains, “we performed in the little hall not the garden, where it was supposed to be. It was weird because it didn’t fit, it didn’t work. So it brought up the  question of where things belong? “When I became a New Zealand citizen in 2001, I attended a ceremony where you have to pledge allegiance ‘to the Queen and all her heirs’. But half the people couldn’t speak English so were pledging allegiance ‘to the Queen and all her hairs’! For a start that was really funny but then it made me think on a deeper level: why aren’t we pledging allegiance to not litter and to protect New Zealand’s environment” It was very strange thing and it started this internal questioning – where do I call home now? ‘I began to look at how other people have come to this country and how they either keep a sense of their culture or assimilate – somewhere or not, not only within a country but inside a group, or in family.

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