Author(s): Douglas Wright

NZ biography

Winner of the New Zealand Society of Authors E H McCormick Best Book Award for Non Fiction in the 2005 Montana New Zealand Book Awards Part love story, part memoir, Ghost Dance is a deeply felt meditation on the art of performance, on absence and on life itself. As in the best of Douglas Wright's dance-theatre work, light and dark are interwoven in deft, mysterious combinations.Ghost Dance swoops from the Everest-highs of the stages of New York and London, down through the back rooms of Manhattan's gay baths of the 1980s. It sits in meditation on silent retreats before labouring at the unyielding coal-face of the performing arts in New Zealand. Malcolm Ross, Janet Frame, Tobias Schneebaum, Billie Farnell, Paul Taylor, Lloyd Newson and a stone from Emily Dickinson's garden are the supporting cast of his odyssey recounted from within the flickering shadows of chronic illness.