What does it feel like to be on stage in the middle of a dance performance?

A huge new 360-degree installation by New Zealand contemporary dance company Black Grace should give you some idea – if that performance was an exhilarating journey through time and space.

The Art of Black Grace 1/5 runs from November 20 until December 10 and is touted as “part-performance, part-exhibition and part-archive”.

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It’s shown in a portable, six-metre-high round structure comprising 288 square metres of LED panels. With a diameter of 15 metres, it’s been set up in downtown Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter and is built to hold 100 people in its centre as the screens beam sounds and sights at them from all sides.

As the numbers at the end of the title suggest, the idea is that it’s the first of five ambitious projects – all conceptualised by Black Grace founder and choreographer, Neil Ieremia.

Black Grace is internationally renowned for mesmerising, high-energy and narrative-rich performances. The company was founded by Ieremia in 1995, and he remains its artistic director, having created dozens of dance works since then.

He tells Broadsheet that he’s often been asked, over the years, what it’s like to be on stage “with people tearing around you at a hundred miles an hour”. It looks great from the audience, he says, but being on stage, “sometimes it can be really terrifying”.

“I wanted to give people that [immersive] experience,” he says. He usually draws on his own life and memories for the themes in his dance shows, and this installation is no different.

At the beginning of the 20-minute loop, you find yourself backstage in the middle of a pre-show huddle of Black Grace dancers, on the screens around you. Then comes a well-known dance work from 1999, and then … it becomes unreal. As in, a fantastical animated story, which Ieremia worked on with New Zealand animator Ant Sang (Bro’Town). Delainy Kennedy of Artificial Imagination took care of post-production and editing.

It follows a loose narrative of a young boy, whom Ieremia describes as going on a “creative journey” – inspired, in part, by his own journey into the arts. Characters from various past Black Grace dances appear at different moments. At one point, the boy takes off through space after being blessed by Samoan gods. Crashing into a star, he’s dragged under the ocean. And the audience is too, as you feel like you’re zooming through space and into the sea behind him. “It’s a real journey,” laughs Ieremia.

The boy is “just a kid from Cannons Creek, with a makeshift jet pack on his back and some old Air Force Ones”. It’s an autobiography of sorts, says Ieremia, who grew up in the Porirua suburb of Cannons Creek and pursued what was seen as an unusual career choice: dance.

It’s a family-friendly show, and Ieremia – who has young kids himself – says he hopes it’ll be exciting for children too, and expose them to “the beauty of our art, here [in] Aotearoa”.

“I want people to come out of there and feel really proud,” he says, “because I think … that story's a universal one – [of] leaving and finding your path in life.”

The Art of Black Grace 1/5
Sunday, November 20–Saturday, December 10. Karanga Plaza, Wynyard Quarter, Auckland. Ticketed sessions on the half-hour, see the booking page for details.

Tickets at ticketmaster.co.nz and blackgrace.co.nz