A guide to Australian contemporary dance In Repertoire www.ozco.gov.au 3 movement dance Dear reader dance installation This guide introduces you to a wide range of Australian contemporary dance works available for international touring. You can find out more about the works, artists and companies on the Introduction Australia Council website, <www.ozarts.com.au>, an interactive online service promoting Australian arts and culture internationally. You'll also Since the appearance of the first edition of this guide in 2000, Australian find touring histories, projected tours, technical specifications and dance has consolidated and expanded its international presence, contact details. performing idiosyncratic and innovative works to appreciative audiences around the world. The overview essay on pages 31-33 provides an accessible introduction to the history and context of Australian contemporary dance and there’s also a brief In recent years the Australian Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, Australian introduction on page 34 to Australian dance on film and video. Dance Theatre, Chunky Move, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Lucy Guerin and Ros Warby are just a few of the companies and artists who have enjoyed The Editors successful tours while others, like Rosalind Crisp, are developing significant collaborations with European partners. Editors Virginia Baxter, Keith Gallasch This new edition is part of Australia Council initiatives for the long term marketing Assistant Editor Michelle Moo of the Australian arts, including dance, in North America, Europe and Asia Design Peter Thorn, i2i design with dance-specific ventures such as the Franco-Australian Contemporary Dance Exchange with Michel Caserta of la Biennale nationale de danse du Cover photographs Val-de-Marne. In 2002 Australian artists appeared in Caserta’s program, Left Bangarra Dance Theatre, Bush, photo Greg Barrett Novembre Australien, and in 2003 the Melbourne International Arts Festival Right top Shelley Lasica, History Situation, photo Rohan Young hosted a number of visiting French dance companies. The value of this Right bottom Gerard Van Dyck, Collapsible Man, photo Nat Cursio multimedia exchange was enhanced by the 2003 Melbourne Festival’s focus on dance, welcoming international presenters with a feast of Australian dance in the Produced by RealTime for the Australia Council context of forums, conferences, a dedicated dance-on-film program and The Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body international masterclasses. Australia Council Diverse as it is in form and geographical distribution, the character of PO Box 788 Australian dance reveals a continuing and deepening fascination with the Strawberry Hills NSW 2012 virtual dance body, with place, popular culture, the riches of multicultural society and the 61 2 9215 9000 fax 61 2 9215 9111 potential of new technologies. The engagement with popular culture has [email protected] been invigorating, as it absorbs and reshapes the energies and dexterities www.ozco.gov.au of break dancing, hip hop and other forms. Readily available technology dance theatre has facilitated the greater use of film and video onstage, allowing dancers RealTime to ‘perform with themselves’ and to inhabit magical virtual spaces. PO Box A2246 Choreographer-filmmakers are creating award-winning films for international Sydney South NSW 1235 distribution and other artists are producing multimedia dance installations, 61 2 9283 2723 fax 61 2 9283 2724 some with opportunities for audience interaction. For a form traditionally [email protected] wary of anything beyond the primacy of the live dancing body, Australian www.realtimearts.net dance is proving to be the most consistently adventurous of art forms. October 2003 Australian dance is also thematically rich, embracing issues of environmental Second edition deterioration, surveillance, sexuality, disability, media manipulation, racial ISBN 1 920784 09 8 discrimination and the plight of the refugee, and, importantly, the impact of science on the body. Equally serious and mature attention is given to formally abstract works and reflections on choreographer-dancers’ lives. In all of this you are likely to encounter, to some degree, a distinctive, ironic Australian sense of humour. Much more detail about each of the works and artists in this guide can be found on the Australia Council website, <www.ozarts.com.au>, including performance specifications for touring as well as contact details. In Repertoire celebrates the breadth and excellence of Australian dance, its capacity for innovation and cultural engagement. Some of the works presented here already have strong touring credentials, some are new–all are ready to go. Jennifer Bott Chief Executive Officer Australia Council 5 ...staggeringly brave, original choreography and an equally brave stand against this age of unbeauty. dB Magazine ...a seamless merging of projected, corporeal and sound media. RealTime Bonemap Fiona Cameron The Bridge Song Inhabited A unique new media performance Originally performed in public designed to pop up where dance is She is committed to creating new for solo dancer, musicians and spaces including laneways, least expected. dance works that question social projection that leads the audience museums and nightclubs, this work 30 mins, 3 performers purpose, using non-traditional on a journey over bridges through explores human interaction with city Well known for her performing performance spaces and direct the lens of urban and environmental environments. From self-consumed career with Chunky Move and Alias audience interaction. ecology. The Bridge Song explores salsa to a claustrophobic game of Compagnie (Geneva), Fiona environmental sensitivity and the train twister, two women navigate Cameron’s work displays a raw ...such elegance, poise and fragile relationship between a body the suffocating metropolis with an physicality and dramatic realism, confidence...[the] merest and its surroundings. accompanying sound artist. Highly dynamic in its extreme investigation physical inflection is eminently Australian Dance Theatre ...an amazing troupe...at home with the beautiful high extensions 50 mins, 3 performers mobile and adaptable street-theatre of the body’s physical capabilities. satisfying. RealTime The Age of Unbeauty and whipping fouettes of ballet as they are with the alarming pops An intermedia arts partnership between Russell Milledge and Garry Stewart’s extreme mix of and rolls of breakdancing... [Birdbrain is] one of the most Rebecca Youdell, the Bonemap combative and breathtaking project is a hybrid mesh of live art, choreography, using hapkido, hazardous explosions of movement seen in London in years. dance, visual art and new media gymnastics and fearless attitude, The Times, London framed by an overarching ecological moves through an avalanche of philosophy. It has been awarded the potent images in which violence, first interdisciplinary Asialink award torture and incarceration are with a residency at The Substation, interspersed with unanticipated Singapore. moments of tenderness and shattering vulnerability. Winner of three 2002 Australian Dance Awards and the Adelaide Critics Circle’s Group Award. 65 mins, 11 performers In one of the most influential dance companies in the country, dancers train in a fusion of forms that results in a unique choreographic palette, producing fast, aggressive, technically demanding work fraught with risk and charged with an urgency that is riveting to watch. The company has taken their acclaimed Birdbrain to the UK. US and UK tours of The Age of Unbeauty are scheduled for 2004-5. 6 The Fondue Set Blue Moves A bumpy ride through the world of the female psyche, exploring the humour, pain and peril of a night on the town. With nods to David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock, this work visits female archetypes from the worlds of film–the femme fatale, the damsel in distress and the paranoid Lucy Guerin Inc. wall flower. A short, sharp, accessible work. Melt/The Ends of Things 50 mins, 3 performers In an intensely focused and dynamic Bringing laughter and tragedy back duet amplified with motion graphics, to dance, The Fondue Set Melt explores each degree of a rise (Elizabeth Ryan, Emma Saunders, Queensland Ballet from freezing to boiling point in the Jane McKernan) have performed at relationship between two women. the Melbourne International Double Take The Ends of Things explores the Comedy Festival, the Adelaide resonance of endings. As one Fringe Festival, the Antistatic dance Two strongly contrasting works man’s life draws to a close, event, Sydney’s Performance showcase the creativity of artistic boundaries between reason and Space and the 2003 Melbourne director and chief choreographer, chaos collapse, unleashing wild International Arts Festival. François Klaus, and the physicality and humorous fantasies. and musicality of the Queensland 85 mins, 4 performers An ode to...femme[s] fatale, the Ballet dancers. A joyful exploration sadness underlying humour and of the strong rhythms and perpetual One of Australia’s leading the darker side of a girls’ night motion of four movements from choreographers, Lucy Guerin has out...an engaging and riveting Bach’s keyboard concerti followed been commissioned by Chunky piece of dance. by a powerful interpretation of Move, Dance Works, Tasdance, Ros Revolver Stravinsky’s monumental Rite of Warby, Woo Co (Denmark) and Spring. Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak 75 minutes, 18 performers Dance Project, USA. She is the recipient of the Sidney Myer