Haunting Douglas

An expertly crafted video portrait of modern dancer and choreographer Douglas Wright, Haunting Douglas owes much of its impact to a generous sampling of the innovator's work

Haunting Douglas, New Zealand, 2003

Director: Leanne Pooley
Production co: Spacific Films
Producers: Leanne Pooley, Shona McCullagh
Photography: John Cavill, Simon Raby, Leanne Pooley
Editor: Tim Woodhouse
Sound: Terry King, Eugene Arts
Music: David Long

With: Douglas Wright, Shona McCullagh, Lloyd Newson, Neil Ieremia, Chris Graves, Patricia Moore,Billie Farnell, Malcolm Ross, Debra McCulloch, Marianne Schulz, Paul Taylor, Tobias Schneebaum, Taiaroa Royal, Kilda Northcott

Featured Dance Films: Ore, Forever, Arc-a Trilogy, As It Is – a fragment, How On Earth, Now Is The Hour, Petrouchka, Faun variations, Last Look, Elegy, Hey Paris, Halo, Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, Gloria, Inland

DV, 75 Minutes, M–offensive language & nudity

“I need to make things to feel that I can cope with whatever reality is. For me, dancing, performing for people, is the ultimate mystery and the ultimate joy.” — Douglas Wright

“Anger is not just mine, anger is like petrol if somebody gets angry someone nearby will catch fire. It’s about exploring the way energy can be transformed through art. I’m lucky, I’ve been given more than my share of anger so I’ve got a lot of it to transform.” — Douglas Wright

“Expertly crafted video portrait of modern dancer/choreographer Douglas Wright, Haunting Douglas owes much of its impact to a generous sampling of the innovator's work. From the opening shots of Wright's supine nude form inch-worming along the floor, a lit candle tucked between his legs, images of the artist's extraordinarily muscled body dominate the film. Documentarian Leanne Pooley savvily incorporates conflicting agendas: He was only interested in showcasing his art, she was intent on uncovering his bio. The documentary works on both levels... Pooley skillfully interweaves current encounters with Wright, tapes of past theatrical performances, excerpts from experimental videos of his pieces, readings from his soon-to-be-published autobiography Ghost Dance and interviews with friendly talking heads. Though Wright mocks the arrogance of the release-form whereby he must renounce all control "in perpetuity" of the film, and decries the director's inclusion of personal experiences painful to him (what he describes as Pooley's "metaphorical pound of flesh"), he turns out to be amazingly forthcoming and, luckily, almost as articulate in his writing and talking as he is mesmerizing on the dance floor. Pooley chooses her dance clips wisely, relating individual numbers to specific areas of Wright's life story yet never allowing the force of his eclectic choreography to be subsumed by mere biography. Wright speaks of the anger that fuels his movements; that rage is on display in a performance of How on Earth. Sorrow over deaths of friends breaks the internal connections of his body in Elegy. Wrestling with mental demons could not find a better visual correlative than the black-and-white clips from Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men. The film traces Wright's early years in the small New Zealand town of his birth where "a dancing boy was frowned on with a frown handed down for generations." Sublimating his gyrations into the more acceptable form of gymnastics pleased his father but not himself, and Wright soon graduated to full-blown hedonism, making a vocation of sex and drugs until a lover suggested he do what he had always wanted to do – dance. At the height of his career as a major dancer with the prestigious Paul Taylor company in New York, Wright quit, returned to New Zealand and developed his own style amid the greenery he could no longer live without. The last act of the biographical drama concerns Wright's struggle with HIV, which at first attracted audiences in untold hundreds "waiting for me to die in time with the music" but also inspired some of his most dramatic work, including Forever, a startling mix of filmed and live performance that brought down the house in Holland. Technical credits are excellent, playing up the contrast between relatively hi-def present-time footage shot by Pooley's cameramen and the grainy, magically murky artifacts that represent other filmmakers' attempts to capture Wright's creations.” — Ronnie Scheib, Variety, 23 January 2004

“Douglas Wright, New Zealand’s prodigious contemporary dance choreographer, has demonstrated his customary instinctive intelligence in agreeing to work with Leanne Pooley, an accomplished filmmaker who knew little about him or about contemporary dance. Struck by his intensity in a newspaper photograph and amazed by the pungency of what he said, she wanted to know more and approached him about making a documentary. There’s a point in the resulting film where he fixes her camera with eyes like darts, and declares that putting his ‘pain or whatever’ on display is the price he’s obliged to pay in order to get his work in front of people again. Penguin Books will soon publish Wright’s ‘autobiographical fiction’, so his avowed aversion to personal revelation should not be taken too literally, but there’s no questioning his cynicism about the dynamics of arts celebrity. With appealing modesty and good humour, Pooley includes her professional relationship with Wright within the frame of the portrait. His reproaches and his commentary on the process become an integral feature of this engagement with a most remarkable man. She had indeed already agreed to allow Wright approval of her selection of the dance excerpts that stud the film. Watching these intstances of Wright’s extraordinary work with Limbs, Paul Taylor, DV8 Physical Theatre, the Royal New Zealand Ballet and with his own companies is an intensely pleasureable experience. The fleeting passage of so many startling moments from works of such condensed brilliance as Wright has given us, exacerbates the craving induced by any truly gripping choreography, to rewind time – or otherwise extend it. It’s hard to imagine an audience who’d watch this film and not emerge wanting to experience these works in their fullness. The preservation and accessibility of every moving picture of Douglas Wright’s choreography should be national cultural priorities. Tracing the often punishing life from which this work has sprung, Pooley draws on Wrights own accounts as vividly enunciated in the forthcoming book, while friends and colleagues, here, in New York and in London, provide anecdotal testimony to his singularity and their enduring amazement. Though she remonstrates with him when he’s devastated by a single bad review in a welter of good ones, Pooley clearly apprehends Wright’s ‘pain or whatever’, his overwhelming sense that he has failed to reach us. He expresses himself in bitingly enunciated paradoxes, reaching us again and again, now that his body refuses to dance, with the vital, lucid artistry of his words. I can think of no more appreciative, perceptive or powerful documentary portrait of an artist in New Zealand than this. — Bill Gosden, NZ Film Festival, 2003

“Life was never going to be sweet for dancing boy Douglas Wright. Unwilling to learn the collective side-step of the rugby-mad small town New Zealand of his birth, he subsumed his gift, first as a champion gymnast then as a prodigious consumer of drugs before devoting himself to the punishing regime that would make him a world renowned dancer and choreographer. Of the multiple hauntings in Leanne Pooley’s film, the most fascinating is Wright’s cruel possession of his own body. His life story is written on his astonishing musculature as, under the force of his imagination, it performs wonderful, self-destructive dances. Wright slams into the floor and his fellow dancers, hangs upside down and maintains a constant violent grace ironically reminiscent of the great All Black his father wanted him to be. Off stage he rages too: great loves, wars with the critics and eloquent loathing of the country that provides the raw material for his work. But even as his body brought him acclaim with Paul Taylor’s Dance Company in New York in the 1980s, Wright was so ferociously tangoing his way up and down gay Manhattan that he couldn’t help but catch the disease he knew but decided not to care about. Now Wright’s life and art collide. He writhes and leaps through increasingly haunting works. And the film maker has some ghost work of her own to do: she departs from the lush cinematographic approach of the rest of the film and with DV camera probes the sick and injured ex-dancer as he bullies younger bodies to realise his latest (will it be his last?) dance. Pooley and Wright make their own fascinating dance around the insights, hatreds and loves that may or may not sustain a body and an artist in the face of death." — www.spacific.co.nz/documentarires/haunting

“…a sad and a triumphant story, at times darkly hilarious. Resilience of spirit is palpable, even though the face is gaunt with sorrow…Profoundly moving, the film is intense, like both its subject and its maker…Pooley pulls together many threads to help us understand and appreciate this dance-maker at work.” — Jennifer Shennan, The Dominion Post

Screenings: Haunting Douglas screened on 2 May 2007 as part of the Arts Foundation Laureates season, to honour the work of Laureates Douglas Wright and film maker/choreographer Shona McCullagh.