Rona Bailey

Rona Bailey (née Stephenson; 24 December 1914 – 7 September 2005) was a New Zealand drama and dance practitioner, educationalist and activist. Bailey was influential in emerging contemporary dance and professional theatre in New Zealand. She was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and part of Treaty of Waitangi anti-racist education that started in the mid-1980s.

Early life and education Rona Bailey was born in Whanganui, New Zealand, on 24 December 1914. Her family moved to Gisborne where they ran a shoe shop. The New Dance Group was modelled after the New York-based company of the same name and in the short time of operating introduced ideas of dance and art to many dancers and audiences. Their dance was described in an article by Marianne Schultz as "modern, political and expressive".

Bailey was a long time colleague of theatre director and teacher Nola Millar and they were both part of Unity Theatre. In 1964 along with Anne Flannery they started the New Theatre School of Drama where Bailey taught movement. Following on from that was the birth of national drama training in New Zealand in 1970 when Bailey became one of the core tutors in the newly started New Zealand Drama School.

Bailey continued teaching at the New Zealand Drama School until 1988. She was instrumental in the schools journey to identify as a bicultural institution in its recognising the Treaty of Waitangi. This included adding a Māori language name, Te Kura Toi Whakaari o Aotearoa which was come to after Bailey consulted with Timoti Kāretu at the Māori Language Commission.

One thing that Bailey was very proud of is her involvement with Project Waitangi. This was government funded education for non-Māori people in New Zealand that ran anti-racism and Treaty of Waitangi workshops, with a principal from pākehā (white New Zealanders) for pākehā. Bailey was a member of this project from when it started in 1985 until when the funding was withdrawn in 1990.

Rona Bailey was a collector of New Zealand ballads and folk songs, which she started while she was recovering from tuberculosis. She and Burt Roth published Shanties by the way (1967) a collection of New Zealand popular and radical folk songs. She was made a life member of the New Zealand Folklore Society in 1970.

Activism and associations

Bailey first became interested in these politics while in the USA and later met members of the Communist Party of New Zealand through Unity Theatre.

In 1975 Bailey was a founder of the Wellington Marxist Leninist Organisation (WMLO) and in 1980 the Workers' Communist League (WCL) formed in 1980. She left the WCL in 1985.

Legacy and death Bailey died in Wellington in 2005, aged 90 years. The work of the New Dance Group was presented in the biennial Rona Bailey Memorial Lecture in 2011 by Marianne Schultz and included students from the New Zealand School of Dance reconstructing the 1945 New Dance Group piece Sabotage in a Factory. and The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa holds in its collections a typewriter of Bailey's amongst other items.