Lives and loves of marching girls

Press, 21 October 1987, Page 19

Lives and loves of marching girls

“The Marching Girls,” a new TVNZ drama, makes its debut tonight at 9 on One.

The seven-parter follows the fortunes of a Wellington-based marching team — the Taita Supremes — all the while telling of the lives, loves and aspirations of the women who make up the group.

"The Marching Girls” has a sizeable female core cast and this fact alone sets it apart from the usual TVNZ drama undertaking. "Woman are . usually shown as sidelines of the plot, never as motivators of lives and aspirations,” says the producer, Steve La Hood. “Never big enough to make whole dramas out of.”

“The Marching Girls” differs from the norm in other ways. For a start its creator Fiona Samuel had never written for television before; La Hood, an experienced director, had never produced before; and Peter Blake, an accomplished musician and respected TV music show producer/director, had yet to compose title music and act as musical director for a major drama.

La Hood admits the series "was a tremendous risk all along the line” and says the risk element spilled over into the casting decisions as well. The young women chosen for the Taita Supremes all had theatrical experience but were raw recruits to the ranks of TV actors and, more significantly, had never marched before. “And they had never been in main roles and never been on every single day,” says La Hood. “None of our directors had worked with 11 or 12 main cast in scenes where every one of them had dialogue.. It was a total risk — talk about trying everything on at once!”

La Hood believes his group of “newcomers” have succeeded in producing a drama series which is first and foremost entertaining and

second has something to say.

He stresses “The Marching Girls” is not so much about marching — although tying the series together is the Taita Supremes’ attempt to make the North Island Championships — but about the individual team members who find themselves in situations which are “funny, entertaining, sometimes sad and very true!

“The stories are small scale but looked at In detail so small events become major dramatic points in the story,” says La Hood. “They are about things like family conflict, the desire to succeed in a creative idea like wanting to be a singer, like workplace difficulties for a woman in the lower to middle group in a big corporation, about how to deal with office politics, peer group pressure and the pressure of family life on the choice of marching.

“I guess you can say the series looks at how daily things affect women in New Zealand and the effect on our women is magnified because they meet three days a week for marching practice.” La Hood says he loves the stories because he believes real drama has less to do with how events play on people and more how people ..■■ play on events.

“Drama on TV is closeup and about human relationships, about daily life which can be fantastic, fun and terribly tragic and very dramatic — it’s just how you look at it

“There’s so much energy and enthusiasm behind the Marching Girls’ stories, and the actors as women identify completely with the characters and play them to the hilt so the performance level is very high. “Worthy the programme is not” says La Hood, “but if has some strong statements to make about the lives of these particular women and the way they have to get through their lives.”