Choreographers in New Zealand

Malia Johnston was born in 1973. She is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, Artistic Director of Rifleman Productions, and Artistic Director of the internationally renowned World of WearableArt™ extravaganza.

With a background in jazz dance, she opened her own studio at the age of seventeen, teaching dance while completing undergraduate studies at Canterbury University. A growing need to learn more about choreography led her to the UNITEC contemporary dance programme for the next three years. She graduated with a BPSA, ready to create her own opportunities.

After two years of intense collaborative experimentation with fellow graduates, in 2001 Johnston began an ongoing collaboration with dancer/choreographer Guy Ryan, formalised in 2004 as the production company Outlaw Creative. Over the next three years they produced six seasons of works, including Johnston's nationally toured Miniatures (2004) featuring space-defining boxes and ladders, and their jointly-devised Terrain (2005) a small-scale duet-installation which has been performed 50 times in New Zealand and Australia.

In 2006, Johnston established Rifleman Productions as an umbrella for major dance works, made in collaboration with theatre director/dramaturge, Emma Willis and long-term collaborator composer/musician Eden Mulholland. To date these include Dark Tourists (2006 and 2008 re-work) and the forthcoming Body fight time (2011).

In addition to her own projects, Johnston has been commissioned extensively to create work for Touch Compass Dance Trust, Footnote Dance, and leading tertiary dance schools. She has also been the principal choreographer for both the annual World of WearableArt™ event and associated international mini-WOW™ presentations since 2002.


Artist Statement

“The work I choreograph investigates the experience of the 'live' body and the relationship we have with controlled space. I'm interested in developing a relationship with what is actually going on and the creative physical manifestation of that. I work with states, developing environments and creating real movement experiences and responses that the dancers draw on for the work we create together.”

“Though abstraction is alluring, narrative is enticing. I’m strongly motivated to explore them both.”
Malia Johnston


Portrait

Fleshing out concepts with movement

Malia Johnston is one of New Zealand's most versatile and widely respected choreographers, with the capacity to create, fine tune and produce events ranging in scale from a twenty-second television commercial to an hour-long dance theatre work or a large scale stadium spectacular. She is also one of the country's most innovative choreographers, working collaboratively to develop new ways of presenting contemporary dance and engaging audiences with challenging material.

Collaborative events in alternative venues

On completion of dance school in 1998, Johnston formed a collaborative company with fellow graduates eager to create opportunities to present their own works. She secured some funding for mentored development periods interspersed with productions, and a memorable series of collaborative, self-produced, experimental events resulted over the next two years. While venues were low cost and often grungy – night clubs, shop windows, arcades, community halls, and outdoor spaces – her audience was steadily growing. Johnston also joined the mixed ability company Touch Compass as a dancer and choreographer, receiving the first of four commissions from them in 1999. Her first commission from Footnote Dance Company followed in 2000.

By 2002, Johnston had secured regular work teaching technique and choreography, and mentoring tertiary dance students, supplemented by a varied array of commercial projects and television work, along with further choreographic commissions. Ready now to tackle her own independent creative projects, she took a problem solving approach to the challenges of engaging an audience with often very abstract movement, making and presenting dance works in a financially sustainable manner, and continuing to extend her choreographic development.

Experimenting with presentation models

Her team of collaborators included composer/musician and former dancer Eden Mulholland, a core group of dancers, a skeleton production team, and choreographer/dancer Guy Ryan. Together they experimented with an array of presenting models: double bill seasons in a hired theatre venue, skeleton budget summer touring, main bill works for touring festivals, and a small scale work for a micro audience with a build-as-you-perform set which can fit inside a van. The focus of these dances ranged widely, from Johnston's impressionistic study of a group of flatmates flowing through the day, and her study of how we deal with the things most precious to us, with dancers tucked into niches and boxes and perched on shelves, to a co-devised and delicately nuanced two-hander about life's shifting patterns.

Subsequently, Johnston established Rifleman Productions as an umbrella for the development of more substantial projects, working in partnership with Mulholland and theatre director/dramaturge Emma Willis on more narrative works. The first of these examines “dark tourism” in the near future when the birds are falling from the skies, and the second focuses on the human body's fight for survival against viruses and other planetary threats to life.

World of WearableArt™

Parallel to these activities, since 2001 Johnston has risen through the ranks as a choreographic team member of New Zealand’s largest annual art event, the two-hour-long Montana World of WearableArt™ Awards Show (WOW®) which runs for an eleven-night season and plays to an audience of several thousand each night. This is a moving exhibition on a grand scale, featuring 150 spectacular handmade garments within an extravagant theatrical environment combining music, dance, lighting and the latest technologies, with a different overarching theme every year. In 2009, Johnston became the event's artistic director, with overall responsibility for choreography and production of the event, and an eight-month annual commitment which allows her to continue with other projects.

Johnston's creative process is similar, regardless of the project and its scale. She develops a concept for the work, researching related material before settling on key images and ideas, developing a series of scenarios, then storyboarding the central interactions which will comprise the work. Movement is then workshopped to flesh out the concept and explore ideas in a physical way, the scenographic elements are added into the mix, and material is further refined. Private viewings explore the audience viewpoint, and production follows. /Raewyn Whyte


Selected Works

Body fight time (forthcoming 2011)
Whether I wear you (2010)
Purlieu (2010)
Atoms and Eves (2009)
Dark Tourists (2008)
10 of Hearts (2005)
Terrain (2004, with Guy Ryan)
Miniatures (2004)
Drift (2003, with Guy Ryan)