Artistic Director Shona McCullagh discusses New Zealand Dance Company’s new ANZAC tribute, Rotunda.

The New Zealand Dance Company is committed to creating new connections to dance and collaborating deeply. Our new piece, Rotunda, is a major work for our company – a heartfelt piece that honours the role brass bands have played in New Zealand society since 1845.

It is also a living memorial to the loss of innocent, good young men who were slaughtered or left traumatised by the events of often ill-planned battles during the First World War. The work draws from the extraordinary courage and indomitable spirit of NZ and Australian men, and the women who set about running the country with aching hearts and dread that their men might not return. And so very many didn’t.

Of the 18,166 New Zealanders who died in the First World War: 12,483 lie in France and Belgium, 2,721 died at Gallipoli and 381 died in Sinai and Palestine. Many of the dead lie in unknown graves: 4,227 in France and Belgium, 1,684 at Gallipoli and 61 in Sinai and Palestine. The Australian numbers are even more atrocious making this work so relevant to us all.

One of the missing dead in France is my great-uncle Martin Raymond Butler, after whom both my father and brother were named. Ray, as he was known, lied about his age in order to sign up and fought with Auckland Infantry Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 16th Company in Egypt and France. He was killed during the Battle of the Somme on 21 September 1916, aged 19 years, 9 months, younger than my own sons now. Commemorated on the New Zealand Memorial to the Missing at Caterpillar Valley Cemetery near Longueval in France, Ray’s stated birthdate on his enlistment form was 17 September 1895 but his actual birthdate was 19 December 1896 (aged 18). His mother Annie never forgave her husband for signing the papers allowing her underage son to go to war.

New Zealand Dance Company in Rotunda

My grandfather Fenton, a quiet and gentle man fought alongside Ray in France but was hospitalised due to illness. He suffered much guilt about leaving his brother-in-law behind in the trenches to die, was traumatised by what he had witnessed and was heard to scream out in the night “the bayonets!”. He never really recovered, spending a lot of time in the back shed nursing whiskey and like so many men, never talked about what happened.

Over 13,000 men were diagnosed with shell shock, classified by the Army as “noisy mental cases” or “incurable lunatics”. Referring to the decomposing, unburied bodies in No-Man’s Land, Bill Callagan of the Auckland Regiment said, “If their mothers could see them, this war would end today”. I just discovered that another relative James Walter McCullagh fought at both Gallipoli and France, miraculously survived both whilst earning a Military Medal for Acts of Gallantry, only to walk into the water in Auckland Harbour to end his life at the age of 54.

The wounds run deep and we acknowledge the grief so many families experienced at a time when one-quarter of our population went to war. Some women lost all of their sons and the generation of talent wiped out still has resonance 100 years later. And yet, the world is still at war as more of ours sons and daughters leave their homes for Iraq.

We are proud to bring the company to the Australia for the very first time with a work created for non-contemporary dance aficionados. We have had standing ovations at many of our New Zealand performances and we are looking forward to collaborating with the stunning local brass bands in Australia. The canon of extraordinary, and mostly New Zealand brass music we have unearthed for this production is powerful and moving, much of which won’t have been heard outside brass band competition circles.

Life is about opposites – the light and the dark, violence and compassion, art and war.  This is our humble attempt to provide balance by giving a voice to those who suffered in WW1 with such spirited courage and generosity, and to honour the sacrifice they made for our peace.

We end the work with commemoration and a vision of a future that is hopefully human harmony and leads us to hope that one day, violence, hatred, greed and bloodshed will end on this planet. Imagine that.

New Zealand Dance Company present Rotunda at Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, May 13 – 15.