- the advent of the small dance companies, their choreographic impact and the relationship to the development of the tertiary dance programs in Australia.
- Nanette Hassall
Returning in 1974, almost a decade after leaving, following intensive study and performance in America and Europe, Sydney seemed a remarkably different place to the one I had left. A new found confidence and pride in Australia’s unique identity and values had made a deep impression on the culture. The waves of post-war immigration had produced a more ethnically diverse population with different passions and interests. The Aboriginal community had finally been recognised in 1967. On a cultural level, the newly formed Australia Council, ambitious, vigorous and well funded, was keen to identify and support original Australian work. And at a personal level, Australian literature, which seemed anything but mainstream before I left, was now promoted on stands under that heading in the big bookshops. Australia felt more “connected”, both to itself and in relation to the international community, symbolised perhaps most cogently in the revocation of the White Australia policy in 1972.
Sydney seemed alive with wonderfully crazy artists – the new music scene in both Sydney and later when I went to Melbourne was highly experimental and galvanised, keen to connect with dance. For example I remember a “concert” organised by The Ashes of Sydney in which music and dance events were organised at various harbourside locations at sunset. The concert organiser, Greg Scheimer, hired a big Sydney Ferry so the audience could view the events from the water. The artists were picked up by the ferry following the showing of their event. I had choreographed a “danced” semaphore work. We sent “messages” across the harbour lit by marine flairs.
Dance across the country however had limited representation. The Australian Ballet was well established. This and two state companies, Queensland Ballet and WA Ballet, constituted the large companies.
The Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), founded in 1965 by Liz Dalman, was the best known of the contemporary companies. The classes and creative work at Bodenweiser dance studios in Sydney typified, I think, most contemporary work at that time. It was a strong school, (bordering a university precinct), which supported performances and choreographic endeavours with dancers who spent most evenings at the studio rehearsing but who through the day were either pursuing studies or in regular employment. They performed to loyal audiences who were necessarily local. There was little in the way of touring infrastructure. Things like the “college circuit” that the American dance companies enjoyed did not exist because of a) the population size and b) the fact that the large tertiary dance programs, apart from Rusden, were in many cases still to be established. The Victorian College of the Arts’ School of Dance (VCA) was not founded until 1979, the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) was founded in 1980 (with dance beginning in 1981) and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) offered its first year of the Associate Diploma in dance in 1979.
(I can’t speak for, and I know Shelley Lasica spoke last year on the company’s work but it seemed) most work in Australian contemporary dance received little formal recognition in a way that would allow it to expand and develop infrastructure. Nonetheless this is not to diminish the importance through the 80s of choreographic opportunities offered by companies like the Modern Dance Ensemble.)
Beginning as “Ballet in a Nutshell”, then “Athletes and Dancers”, Sydney Dance Company was still known until 1979 as Dance Company of NSW. This enterprise took an enormous step forward in terms of establishing a larger company, when Jaap Flier was appointed in January, 1975. A former director of Nederlands Dance Theatre, Jaap encouraged both choreographic development while introducing Sydney to some of the international dance classics – Glen Tetley’s “Pierrot Lunaire”, Butler’s “Carmina Burana”, and Anna Sokolov’s “Deserts”.
But by the end of the 80s, a little over ten years later, the list of companies is quite extraordinary. As I read these out it is worth noting that these companies were, in the main, recipients of substantial financial support from both state and federal funds, in amounts that would make today’s funding for similarly sized companies seem completely inadequate.
ADT - Jonathan Taylor was appointed ADT’s director in 1977. For a short period of time ADT actually serviced both SA and Victoria. The company was later directed by Leigh Warren followed by Meryl Tankard.
Bangarra – 79 – Sydney
Bharatam – 87 – Melbourne
Dance Exchange - 76 - Sydney
Dance North (originally North Queensland Ballet) – 85 – Townsville
Dance Works – 83 – Melbourne
Danza Viva Spanish Dance Company – 85 – Perth
Expressions – 84 – Brisbane
Feats Unlimited – 83 - Darwin
Fieldworks Performance Group – 88 – Perth
Human Veins Dance Theatre (later Meryl Tankard Company and Vis-à-vis) – 80 - Canberra
One Extra – 76 – Sydney
Outlet – 87 – Adelaide
2 Dance (eventually to evolve into BUZZ Dance Theatre) – 85 – Perth
The Chrissie Parrott Dance Collective just misses out, being formed in 1991 in Perth.
The Dance Co. of NSW became Sydney Dance in 79.
How did this happen? In any one’s language this is an amazing burgeoning of dance and movement exploration that was eventually to affect every aspect of the way we viewed dance. The events of the 80s challenged many of the long held values and views about dance. Who danced? Where did they dance? How was it created?
The growth of small companies paralleled the development of tertiary dance institutions. One of the unique aspects I think of Australia’s dance history is the vital and close links maintained between the dance profession and the tertiary courses.
New graduates had the opportunity to audition for a range of quite different companies across the country that generally offered wages and conditions that would be the envy of many small companies today. The companies further developed and extended the dancers’ professional performance skills. Older, more experienced dancers mentored those with less experience. Their establishment offered opportunities for some of those amazing dancers Australia had produced, and who had left to work overseas, to return and contribute to the development of dance in Australia. The companies also acted as “hothouses” for choreographic development. Dancers worked through an amazing array of choreographic processes and structures. They performed them. In other words they understood them not only at an intellectual level but at a deep kinaesthetic level. They inhabited these structures and processes. This kind of knowledge is hard to quantify perhaps but as a dancer who has been through those experiences I would say they were invaluable.
The small companies provided a variety of models of production. Some were repertory companies, providing openings for many of the more established choreographers’ works and opportunities to develop a recognisable body of work. All of the companies were involved in some touring but quite a number were based on extensive touring. Dance North was perhaps one of the most outstanding examples of this. The Feats Unlimited program included tours to Aboriginal communities.
Tasdance covered an extensive and broad spectrum of performances for both adult and school audiences inviting an impressive number of both young and highly experienced choreographers to work with the company.
Beginning as a dance in education company 2 Dance Plus in Perth gradually expanded its brief to include adult performances. Others companies became the expression of one person’s choreographic endeavours. To my knowledge all the small companies, however, offered opportunities for the dancers to experiment choreographically utilising the company’s dancers, resources and spaces.
From pockets of activity in isolated parts of the country we ended the 80s with a contemporary dance “scene” in Australia. There was a more active understanding and interest in the form. Dance was owned by more people.
Danceworks
Danceworks grew out of my teaching and choreographing at the VCA where I had been appointed lecturer in charge of Contemporary Studies following a brief period of teaching at what at that time was known as Rusden State College, later to be absorbed into Deakin.
I had returned from performing overseas in the Cunningham Company after graduating from the Juilliard School in New York. I had taught, choreographed for and performed with Strider in London. I had also taught at Dartington College of the Arts in the UK.
I was extremely fortunate to be in New York through the late sixties and seventies. A time of enormous political upheaval, it had also been an extraordinarily rich period creatively in America. A not dissimilar proliferation of significant companies and choreographers emerged through the seventies as happened in the 80s in Australia – Trisha Brown, the artists working with Grand Union including Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, Twyla Tharp and Meredith Monk amongst others established what would become enormously influential companies. Major European companies were also performing at the Lincoln Centre along with New York City Ballet. Another phenomenon was Alvin Ailey’s company. This company had actually visited Australia providing much inspiration to me before I left for the States.
The advent of Cunningham’s philosophy that “any movement can follow any other” and Cage’s inclusion of chance in composition radicalised the arts. Design aspects emerged in the work of their associates in the visual arts – Rauschenberg, Warhol and Jasper Johns. A demystification and de-codification of professional dance began in earnest in the States and those ideas gradually filtered to Europe and eventually to Australia. Any movement could constitute dancing and the gamut of human movement itself became the site and source of inspiration. Pedestrian and gestural language has become a cliché now but it was unusual at the time. Dance could happen anywhere – a car park lot - Monk’s work on Joan of Arc, a lake - Trisha Brown’s Accumulation or St Marc’s Square in Venice where Merce choreographed an event in which he swept the audience (literally) to various location points on the square through which the company danced. Tharp’s early work embraced a host of movement references from diverse movement sources and we owe some of the choreographic processes, so familiar to us now, to her intense choreographic rigour – accumulation, de-accumulation, retrograde and inversion.
Such a proliferation of experimentation and philosophic approaches also profoundly affected notions of training. Along with those techniques that were well established – Graham, Limon and Horton techniques, a number of new techniques developed in parallel – Cunningham technique, Contact Improvisation, Ideokinesis, and the development of Release work. These were the things that interested me most, embodying the sense of choreographic adventure and daring that had characterised much of what I had experienced.
In London, dance institutions such as the Place produced a diverse group of young and exciting choreographers including Sally Potter, Di Davies, Fergus Early, Jacqui Lansley and Richard Alston. Then, as now, London was a place where artists and companies moved through on a continual basis. In both London and New York there were performances to see on a daily basis.
On my return to Sydney, I began choreographing, teaching and performing with Russell Dumas in Dance Exchange. I joined the dance Company of NSW and then, when I moved to Melbourne, I taught initially for a brief period at Rusden and then extensively at the VCA. The VCA provided many choreographic opportunities in addition to the opportunity to develop a comprehensive contemporary curriculum. The link between education and practice was so important then. Dancers who had in-depth experience in contemporary practice were very hard to find. If you wanted to choreograph then first you had to develop dancers in the styles and vocabularies in which you wished to delve.
Dance Works was formed as a co-operative of people interested in choreographing. In this respect, Dance Exchange had been similar in its intention, as indeed had Strider. In many ways all these companies acted like choreographic research laboratories, offering many opportunities to pursue questions linked to dancing, consequently informing practice, performing and making work. Danceworks was a company interested in choreography and choreographers. Whatever money was derived in grants and was not tagged was largely spent on maintaining an intensive working environment by supporting the wages of its members. The licence to spend time in a space with dancers has to be one of the great but, it would seem, increasingly rare privileges in creative environments. (Co-incidentally the first affordable and portable video cameras meant that the working hours in the studio could be extended at home. The work of the day could be reviewed and evaluated with many lessons learned.)
I noted with some irony recently the success of Hofesh Schechter, a young, relatively unknown Israeli choreographer, who was given support to work in a space with dancers for prolonged periods of time as an experiment. He is now the winner of the 2008 Critic’s Circle National Dance Award for Choreography (modern) with his own company. Why are we surprised when we know the result of the research of people like Anders Ericsson’s work on intensive practice and its relation to success and the more contentious findings reported by Dan Coyle on research exploring the ways in which intensive practice creates physiological changes in the neural pathways between the brain and muscle groups, encouraging the growth of myelin around the nerve fibres. The thicker the myelin the faster the messages travel.
The founding members of Danceworks were Sally Gardner, Anne Thompson, Sue Healey, Beth Shelton, Trevor Patrick and myself. Later members included Rebecca Hilton, Delia Hall, Linda Sastradipradja, Sandy Parker, Lucy Guerin, Brian Smith, and Phillip Adams amongst others. The company’s output was prolific. In the first five years of its operation, before I left, over sixty new works were presented. In fact, only new work was presented. Maintaining repertoire was not a part of the company’s philosophy. The company’s subsidy grew to $.5 million, a mix of state and federal funding.
One of the rationales for the company’s creation was my observation that while Australian dancers were recognised internationally as some of the best in the world, the same level of recognition was not afforded its choreographers. A number of different methods for making work were experimented with in Danceworks. These ranged from intensive and rigorous processes of analysis and deconstruction of movement, to group devised work. We explored task-based methods, collaborative processes and a large range of improvisational techniques of which contact work for me was the most important.
Danceworks experimented with lots of different aspects of performance. Public spaces such as town halls, galleries, malls, gardens, even elevators became potential venues. This was not necessarily simply transferring work from the studio to these spaces. Methods of producing site-specific works evolved. For instance the performances of “Around Squares”, a collaborative work with visual artist, Tim Newth, Healey’s “Tango Piece”, and my “Arcadian Corridor”, a work created in collaboration with music group, La Romanesca, were performed in the enormous body of the Melbourne Town Hall as part of the Spoleto Festival held in Melbourne.
Similarly, specific approaches evolved for creating dance in different community settings. Danceworks, for a time the only dance company supported by the state, did a number of intra-state tours, state tours and one international tour. The regional tours were very strange experiences but one of these towns, Wangaratta, seemed to be particularly interested in, and excited by, the company’s work. This eventually led to Beth returning to direct a large community dance project with the town. Part of the Australia Council’s charter included art experiences being made available to all. An innovative (I would say, world leading) community arts movement evolved in Australia supported by the Community Arts Board at the Council but it was many years before dance really developed models that were appropriate and sympathetic to this art form practice.
Danceworks had close ties and links with other companies and other dance institutions. We trialled company-in-residence programmes at the VCA and at the SA course directed by Davis and Simi Roche. We had an on-going close association with both Tasdance and Dance Exchange. I think many in the company were interested in developing Australian work, created by Australian dance makers, ephemeral as those definitions might be.
I also think that Danceworks in those early years was a company who were interested in how dancers were educated. What is learned? What changes could we expect might happen in the acquisition of those skills? I think sometimes that technique is seen as somehow utilitarian instead of something that is alive and changing. But clearly we are what we dance and the work we make is directly linked to those experiences.
In this paper, I am keen to explore the nexus that I think exists between the education of the dancer and choreographic output. In my early history of teaching dance, I could move from a class with non-dancers one day and then give a company class for the Dance Co. of NSW the next. You might have trouble today understanding just how truly shocking it was to expect those professionals to lie on the floor to begin class. There was mass revolt. It was not going to happen! I had to think again. Cunningham classes were perfectly acceptable for the moment but the question remained. I was the same person teaching both. It was not strange to me – what was the link?
Gradually through much synthesising of information, sifting and re-thinking, I arrived at a solution which I then expanded at the VCA and Danceworks. What I tried to develop (and still am excited by) was a coherent, graded and organised structure of movement ideas/principles that could illuminate any technique, yet one that remained flexible and responsive to new ideas and information. Practising the ideas, it seemed to me, was what changed and transformed bodies. The simpler, the more physically efficient the dancer became, the greater his or her capacity for complexity. The process also engaged the imagination. The emphasis was less on steps and more about the nature of moving and being moved. In fact the demarcation between one “technique” and another became less stable, more fluid and, as any scientist interested in ecology will tell you, it is the transition zones ecologically that produce the richest and most abundant life. This approach clearly aligned with the choreography. I still believe that those skills, technical and choreographic, need to be integrated into any practice. The level of sophistication demanded of dancers today is extraordinary and by bringing those skills into the classroom and studio, we recognise them as simply a coherent and integrated part of the repertoire of skills that are required. Maintaining the link between education and professional output is one we need to fight to maintain.
The link between the establishment of the small dance companies, their choreographic investigations into dance, and the development of the tertiary dance programs were all significant contributions of the 80’s.
This article has been adapted from an oral presentation given in June 2009 as part of the Ausdance 2009 Dance History Symposium ' Changing Landscapes'.
