Michael Earl Parmenter MNZM (born 1954) is a New Zealand choreographer, teacher and dancer of contemporary dance.
Parmenter studied dance in the 1980s in New York and was influenced by both New York-based choreographer Erick Hawkins and Japanese Butoh master Min Tanaka.
[4] Parmenter talks about being gay and living with HIV in a TV documentary about him[5] and in his autobiographical solo performance A Long Undressing.
Reporter Simon Wilson recounting a significant moment in the arts for him about a Parmenter performance:I remember Parmenter telling his life story, the boy from Southland, born in the 1950s, gay in a conservative Christian family, how he got from there to dance, and then to a show based not on choreography but on words, although there was some very lovely dance in it too.
[9][10][11] In 2022 Parmenter spent six months in Dunedin as the Caroline Plummer Dance Fellow at the University of Otago, during which he established a Balfolk group in the city.