Dance stories

Collaboration is an essential element, she adds. Kisha, who is Head of Dance at Excel School of Performing Arts, is a PhD student in Dance Studies at the University of Auckland and in 2025 became the first-ever recipient of the new Buchanan Dance Research Residency Award.

Kisha’s PhD research centres on “conversations about choreography” – especially the question of how “to strip back the process of creating it and handing it on to others”.

She is constructing a set of tools to be used by other practitioners, which are designed to open new creative possibilities.

These comprise a book and a collection of cue cards, providing a vital spark to be built on through brainstorming. Together they form the base for a workshop spanning two or three days. Each participant takes a cue – either verbal or visual – to create a series of movements which they note down as intersecting, wavy lines. They then get together in pairs, and then in threes and fours and fives, to combine their movements and create new sequences based on a collaborative exchange and integration.

These resources are totally new, and unique in two important ways.

One is that they’re centred on ‘ubuntu’, a philosophy common to many African cultures and often translated as “I am because you are”. Ubuntu is based on belief in a bond that connects the people in a community and is shared by the whole of humanity. The other is that Kisha has been influenced also by the Māori concept of tūrangawaewae, which is about the profound connections between people and the land, often translated as “a place to stand”. She has found “there are aspects of tūrangawaewae that mirror the beliefs of ubuntu”.

Kisha was born in South Africa and lived five years there, in Cape Town, where she will do her six-week residency at the university where her father studied. This gives an amazing chance to extend her understanding of ubuntu “in the soil in which it grows”, exploring how its philosophy is embedded in the community and applied in creative contexts such as music and theatre.

The donor is Lady Rosemary Buchanan, a former Principal Dancer in the Royal New Zealand Ballet company who is committed to the advancement of dance through research.

Kisha feels honoured to have received the award, which has already opened doors that she never even thought of – including a publishing opportunity – with the strong encouragement of her supervisor. She hopes the generous and “thoughtfully-designed” gift will have a “ripple effect” that flows on to other researchers at the University of Auckland and elsewhere.