- Julie Dyson AM, National Director, Ausdance
This has been a most stimulating discussion and one that has thrown much light on the political and artistic environment of the 1970s and 1980s. It has been a privilege to hear from leading artists of the day, complemented by advocates and administrators who were active and influential in the development of dance policy that supported and promoted their work.
My brief is to provide an overview of dance policy during this period, which gives me the perfect opportunity to acknowledge a key thinker and activist of the 1980s, Kathryn Lowe, then the Dance Officer at the Australia Council. Many people here will be familiar with her work, and indeed may even owe their early dance careers to her. And I do wonder what bureaucrats today would think about being described as an activist! But Kathryn was that rare person – a dancer, teacher, choreographer, dance writer AND bureaucrat – for whom this is a most apt description.
Kathryn’s main interest in developing and articulating policy for dance, both at the Australia Council and later with State funding bodies, was for the artists themselves: in their vision, the diversity of their work, and the viability of their emergent companies. She was appointed to the position of Dance Officer of the Australia Council’s Theatre Board in the late 1970s, and was therefore in the fortunate position of being able to use her experience, initiative and extraordinary intuition to encourage emerging artists of the day, including Russell Dumas, Nanette Hassall, Kai Tai Chan, Don Asker, Maggi Sietsma, Cheryl Stock, Jenny Kinder and Maggi Phillips. Kathryn can therefore also be credited with assisting the emergence of the companies led by these remarkable artists: Dance Exchange, Danceworks, One Extra, Human Veins, Expressions Dance Company, Dance North, Tasdance and Feats in the NT. She was also a much-valued supporter and mentor to many others, including Graeme Murphy, then a young artistic director, facing what must have seemed almost insurmountable financial problems for Sydney Dance Company early in the decade.
Here I want to add a bit of personal history about her role with Ausdance, then the Australian Association for Dance Education. After AADE’s foundation in 1977, it struggled as a voluntary organisation to establish and implement its priorities. By the early 1980s, Hilary Trotter and I had worked with a wonderful committee in the ACT to develop a strong program of dance development there, made more urgent because of the small jurisdiction, and the lack of a company, tertiary institution or much activity beyond the private studio sector. Our program included residencies by visiting companies, teacher development, lecture-demonstrations by professional artists and a summer school, which still exists today. Kathryn had encouraged us to apply for funding to support this program, and was instrumental in ‘bending the rules’ to allow it to fit in with the Theatre Board’s priorities. This is just one example of Kathryn’s intuition, assisted by a funding environment that enabled the bureaucracy to be more flexible than was possible later, particularly in the 1990s.
What made this period of dance development so unique? Was it the sheer strength of the artistic vision emerging at that time? Was it a period at the Australia Council where anything new and visionary was seen to be worth the risk of support? Or was there just more money then?
Personally, I don’t think it was the latter, but I do think flexibility of approach by the Australia Council allowed people to think about their applications for funding in the broader context of dance development, as well as allowing for their own personal development.
In reviewing dance policy in the 1980s, I have turned to two seminal reports commissioned by the Australia Council: The 1981 ‘Theatre Board: Support for Professional Dance’ by Kathryn Lowe, and the 1990 discussion paper ‘Directions for the Future of Dance in Australia’ by Peter Alexander & Associates, prepared in the lead-up to the 1991 Dance Summit. These two publications conveniently book-end this period between 1980 and 1990.
In 1981 there were five full-time companies funded by the Australia Council:
The Australian Ballet
Australian Dance Theatre
West Australian Ballet
Queensland Ballet
Sydney Dance Company
Kolobok (until 1980)
AIDT – the Company was the only Indigenous dance company at that time, growing out of a NAISDA alumni initiative, but The Australian Ballet School was funded by the Theatre Board at that stage.
On p.71, Kathryn notes:
‘(In 1981) It is still difficult to make a career as a professional dancer or as a choreographer. In the first instance, it is difficult for the dancer or choreographer to get experience. In 1980, there were approximately 120 dancers employed on a full-time basis (12 months) on at least Equity minimum award by The Australian Ballet and the four regional companies in Australia. And as the contemporary companies tend to develop choreographic works from dancers within their companies, the employment situation for the freelance choreographer is also severely limited.’
By 1994 this situation had improved – there were then 23 companies in receipt of regular full or part-time funding by either the Australia Council and/or State and Territory governments (Ausdance Guide to Australian Dance Companies). While some of these were project companies, between them they employed 225 full-time dancers and about 50 part-time dancers on a project basis. I will not attempt to provide comparisons between this period and the present, except to say that numbers of dancers in the full-time State companies have been considerably reduced. However, while many of the smaller companies in the 1994 Guide have now disappeared, many others have developed in their place. Contrary to some perceptions, the current decade has seen quite a lot of growth in the small to medium dance sector, although not in the number of full-time jobs – a discussion for another day!
The rise of the smaller companies was a particular hallmark of the 1980s, and with it came the inevitable growth of the independent dance sector, in some part due to the expansion of tertiary dance, pioneered in 1976 by Shirley McKechnie with the first course at Rusden. By 1990 Ausdance’s Further Studies in Dance had recorded 12 tertiary dance courses in Australia, a phenomenal growth in the sector, and in the training of dancers as artists with many other career options.
‘Options’ was also the name given to the first tertiary dance festival in 1989, which grew out of the desire of the Tertiary Dance Council of Australia to see dancers better networked, better educated and with a much higher national profile. The Options tertiary dance festival has been a fixture on the dance calendar every second year since then, and many of the current generation of dancers will remember meeting long-term collaborators while they were students at these festivals.
Paradoxically, it is interesting to note that in the 1990 discussion paper (p.23), there was considerable concern being expressed about the number of dancers being trained:
‘There is a widely held view that far too many students are being trained as dancers, for far too few professional career opportunities. This is seen to be exacerbated by the concentration in the training on performance … many will not have been trained to teach or choreograph.’
On the training of choreographers (p.25):
‘Most choreographers are poorly paid and there is little incentive for them to go on and develop their art. This places inordinate pressure on artistic directors who are faced with continuing demands to be the chief producers and to deliver a huge range of goods in a very short period of time. … The benefits of funding choreographic development through a grant system which allows for longer times for choreographers to work on their projects was suggested by many people. It was suggested that, as a general rule, there should be a minimum of three months support for this type of program … the benefits would not only be in outcomes of projects, but there would be spinoffs in terms of better use of the time of artistic directors.’
On Safe Dance and career transition:
‘Views have been put that smaller companies must place great stress on dancers’ health and fitness. … The demands on dancers’ time are enormous and there is very little time for personal development or reflection and career development. It was suggested that dance companies should be in a position where they can engage a greater number of dancers than those required on stage at any one time.’
It is hard to believe that these observations were made less than 20 years ago. Safe Dance practice is now taken for granted, and there are several centres where choreographic research and development are core business. We have postgraduate research being undertaken by practising artists, and our highly trained dance graduates are obviously contributing to Australia’s cultural and creative economies – they are much more than simply wonderful technicians; and, of course, we have SCOPE for Artists. But we shouldn’t forget that in 1987 and 1989 there had been two meetings between tertiary and artistic directors which attempted to address these issues, and I think we all learned a great deal from one another in what was an exciting artistic environment.
While it can be seen from the 1990 discussion paper that the unprecedented growth in dance activity in the previous decade had resulted in great artistic benefits, in some respects this growth had also outstripped the ability of policy makers, funders and educators to keep pace. The 1991 Dance Summit, convened by the Australia Council to examine these issues, listed many useful recommendations, among them the need for greater emphasis on dance education.
This key recommendation was a challenge – while dance had been part of physical education curricula, and it was mostly dedicated PE teachers who ensured that it was taught at all, it was not recognised by education bureaucrats as an art form, with its own body of knowledge and necessary resourcing. Its inclusion with the Arts in the National Curriculum, both in 1992 and again just recently, provides Ausdance, as a lead member of the National Advocates for Arts Education, with a unique opportunity to bring more funding and human resources into the teaching of dance in our schools.
In this brief presentation I have tried to outline some of the key developments of the 1980s, but I should also note the important role of the States and Territories, which were beginning to invest more strongly in local product. The balance between federal and state government funding for the arts was becoming more equitable, enabling smaller projects to develop and providing a welcome recognition that dance could be supported on many levels.
In conclusion, I would like to return to 1981 and quote some of the Kathryn Lowe’s remarks in her summary of the future of dance in Australia:
‘The Theatre Board sees as a policy priority an increase in special project assistance to individuals, especially Australian choreographers, and to small modern dance companies. It does not wish to encourage a proliferation of modern companies, but believes that increased assistance to existing groups of high quality and to talented individual choreographers will improve quality and encourage reasonable growth as audiences for contemporary dance continue to develop.
And:
‘The development of the Australian choreographer is seen as a high priority by the Theatre Board, and preference in funding will be given to companies and individuals encouraging and presenting the Australian product.’
And finally:
‘Without an increase in its funds from the Support for the Arts allocation, the Theatre Board will only be able to respond to the growing needs of dance at the expense of other performing arts for which it is responsible.’
Almost 30 years on, I’m sure we would all endorse that! But without the policy blueprint set out in this 1981 report, I doubt we would have seen the growth of small companies and individual artists that occurred in the 1980s, nor would Ausdance have been allowed to flourish. Kathryn was awarded a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2007 Australian Dance Awards, and it is fitting that today we again honour that achievement.
Finally, I commend to you her Ten Commandments – in her words, ‘I use them to advise artists and arts organisations on how and why to approach governments’:
1. Subsidy is a privilege, not a right.
2. Just because you exist does not mean you shall be funded.
3. Subsidy is about the future of the art, not the past.
4. Money is only money, you must make it happen.
5. Don’t tell us what’s wrong until you can tell us what to do about it.
6. There are other artists, organizations and artforms just as worthy as you.
7. What you want to do may be more important than who you are.
8. A grant is not a prize, a funding round is not a contest, subsidy is an investment in the art, not a promise.
9. The bureaucracy is there to help you, not to hurt you.
10. Try to make an art of your application.
This paper, delivered with great flair and humour at the 1993 Ausdance conference, The Politics of Dance – Policy, Process and Practice, is published in full on the Ausdance website at www.ausdance.org.au.
This article has been adapted from an oral presentation given in June 2009 as part of the Ausdance 2009 Dance History Symposium ' Changing Landscapes'.
