Kinesis Magazine

- Shirley McKechnie

In this section of the Dance History Symposium I have been asked to speak about three matters – all of them very close to my heart and to my own personal journey through a life in dance.

These three matters are

1. The legendary summer schools at the University of New England, especially those devoted to choreographic development in 1974 and 1976, and the role Of Dame Peggy van Praagh, Founding Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet, in these events.

2. The rationale behind the development of tertiary dance courses – the why and how they came about.

3. The foundation of AADE (now AUSDANCE)  – and the rationale behind its growth and development.

 

I’m sure you will agree that this is a difficult task in the time we have available. However I will try to give you an overview of how these events came about and more importantly, how closely they were connected. I think of them as a narrative spanning many years and drawing on the contributions of many Australian dance artists, students and teachers, as well as a few notable ones from overseas.

When I try to think about which of these events came first I am immediately back in the early 1960s when I had a thriving school of modern dance in the Melbourne suburb of Beaumaris. A group of young and talented students had been studying with me since I founded the school in 1955. They were now skilled performers approaching early adulthood and performance at a deep and serious level was a goal for all of us. For me it was the lure of having my own company on which to practice my ever-growing ambitions as a choreographer. For the young dancers it was – well, dancing. Audiences in the local area were no problem. The community in art-crazy Beaumaris was very proud of its talented young dancers and their company, the Contemporary Dance Theatre. My problem was how to extend their fame to audiences beyond the local area. I also wanted to learn what I could about new teaching methods especially in the area of choreography, a study I had commenced with my teachers Daisy Pirnitzer and Hanny Kolm in the 1940s.

To keep a long tale as brief as possible this interest led me to reading and research in matters of dance education in other countries. There wasn’t much, but stories of the growth of tertiary dance courses in American universities were frequently referred to in the American Dance Magazine of the period. The history of these courses, the people who had founded them and their impact on the dance profession was exciting news. I read of people like Martha Hill and her work at the summer schools held at Bennington College in the state of Vermont during the 1930s. The influence of these yearly events on the growth of modern dance companies and their audiences in the USA was profound. I wanted to know more about it and began a correspondence with Lydia Joel, then editor of Dance Magazine. The information she sent me was invaluable. Some years later we met in New York and I was able to express my gratitude for her generosity during that time.

So I guess that these issues (teaching, learning, training, advocating) somehow became more integrated in my mind over time and eventually became the rationale behind the concept and development of the first tertiary dance degree in Australia. It led, in time, to my undertaking an honours degree at Monash University - in English Literature, there were no dance courses - in order to qualify myself to teach in a university and to start the necessary processes when I had the opportunity to do so. In January of 1969, the year I began my odyssey at Monash, I attended the Summer School at the University of New England in Armidale in northern NSW. This was the beginning of a deep and lasting friendship with Dame Peggy van Praagh. In turn this led to my considerable involvement in the two choreographic ‘workshops’ that were at the centre of the summer schools held at the university in 1974 and 1976. The first two Schools in 1967 and 1969 were not focussed on the craft of choreography but on the history of the ballet, the modern movements of the twentieth century, and the development of dance as an art form.

What began as an attempt to create a fuller appreciation of ballet grew into a series of events that changed the way Australian dance artists viewed themselves and each other. For the first time, dancers from all parts of the country met together and understood that they were all part of the growth of a recognizable ‘Australian Dance’. It had been many years in the making and Peggy van Praagh was probably the first to recognize in Australian dancers that their identity as Australians made a difference to the way they danced and the way they thought about their art form.

It is interesting to note that while she had initiated ‘choreographic workshops’ within the Australian Ballet as early as 1971, these took the form of providing encouragement and support, (in terms of studio space and some time for the dancers and the choreographers to work together) with the goal of presenting completed works to audiences in a theatre. This was very similar to the work van Praagh had already done in England and we know from their own testimony that both John Cranko and Kenneth McMillan 1 were greatly influenced by Peggy van Praagh, as were Graeme Murphy, Ian Spink, Leigh Warren, and others in Australia during van Praagh’s time as Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet.

The similarly titled choreographic workshop at Armidale in 1974, however, was of an entirely different order. It placed emphasis on the transparency of the choreographic process; how it was experienced, and how the day-to-day perceptions of dance makers, performers and audience might be expressed and understood. The participants were dancer-choreographers who worked each day with the resident musicians and provided a dancing pool for one another, while the students and faculty of the wider summer school provided an enchanted, but informed nightly audience, which observed, commented on, and questioned the rough sketches which had evolved from the dance ideas that were being explored each day.

Seven of the twelve dance artists invited to take part in 1974 were members of the Australian Ballet: Garth Welch and Marilyn Jones, Ian Spink, Gail Ferguson, Paul Saliba, Julia Cotton and John Meehan. The other five represented all states and a variety of companies. Rex Crampthorne, then an emerging talent as a theatre director in Sydney was one of these.

The Gulbenkian Foundation in London, then under the direction of Peter Brinson, gave generous support with the funding of this 1974 workshop, as did the Australian Council for the Arts, (as the Australia Council was called in its earliest manifestation). The event took place over nearly two weeks in January, as the previous summer schools had done. The requirements of the funding bodies, combined with the close friendship that existed between Peter Brinson and Peggy van Praagh, ensured that its results were closely monitored. The success of this initial choreographic venture led to the ambitious program held over three weeks in January 1976.

In an article in Dance Australia in 1984 dance writer and critic, Blazenka Brysha, commenting on the significance of the Armidale years referred to the work of Bernard James, a senior lecturer in the university’s Department of Continuing Education and to the part played by van Praagh in their organisation and support. She noted that several hundred people attended the Summer Schools over the years of their operation and that what began as an attempt to enhance a fuller appreciation of ballet, ended by contributing an important chapter to the history of dance development in Australia. She wrote

 

 

These ‘legendary’ summer schools in dance are now acknowledged as a major influence in shaping the ways in which Australian dance artists and scholars began to think about their heritage and the influences that had formed them. The summer school of 1976 was ambitious and very well funded. The co-directors of the Choreographic Workshop were Martha Hill, then Director of the Dance Division of the Juilliard School in New York, and Norman Morrice, who had built an international reputation as Director of Ballet Rambert in its metamorphosis from a ballet company to a modern dance company. With Peter Brinson, they formed the most distinguished dance faculty ever assembled in Australia. 3 While Peter Brinson’s seminars on dance history and criticism 4 buzzed with the excitement of intellectual challenge, the choreographers worked each day, sharing the services of thirty dancers and several musician-composers. Martha Hill and Norman Morrice were constantly in demand as mentors for the young dance artists, among them Graeme Murphy, who seemed to produce new wonders at every turn, the power of his youthful imagination in full flight. Each evening, the faculty and students of the entire school met to share the results of the days’ endeavours and to discuss their import.

Peter Brinson, who made his first journey to Australia in the summer of 1976, was a primary catalyst in the process that led, eventually to the formation of our national body, Ausdance. Beginning in the late 1950s Peggy van Praagh and Peter Brinson began collaborating in the writing of what was described as the ‘first exhaustive study of all aspects of choreography, written from wide experience and from sound scholarship after six years research’. The Choreographic Art has become a classic. Published in 1963 it contains an appendix (Appendix viii) that proposed a syllabus for the education and training of choreographers in Britain. It was intended as a prototype for a three-year course to be directed and taught at University level.

At the Summer School of 1974 Keith Bain and I were both members of the faculty led by Peggy van Praagh. Educational psychologist, Dr Warren Lett, conducted daily ‘encounters’ attended by the twelve choreographer-dancers. Together we began to explore the idea of establishing a national body that could embrace all Australian dance artists interested in furthering the cause of dance education on the widest possible level. Later that year the Theatre Board of the Australia Council decided that the time was right to explore some of the issues relating the arts to education. This initiative was held in the Green Room of the Sydney Opera House and was a conference by invitation. Members of education departments, companies and other interested persons were brought together to take an initial look at some of the problems of performing arts companies in relationship to educational issues in Australia. Both Peggy van Praagh and Keith Bain attended this conference while I was on a study tour of dance institutions in North America and Europe.

The idea continued to be in our thoughts as the summer school for 1976 was being planned. Dame Peggy was an ardent supporter of the idea and by 1977, Hanny Exiner and Donna Greaves, then Dance Officer at the Australia Council had joined us in Melbourne to plan the first conference of what was to become the Australian Association for Dance Education, or AADE. This was The Australian Dance Council, or Ausdance in its first manifestation.

By this time I had finished my degree and with a grant from the Australia Council had travelled across the USA visiting many of the tertiary institutions whose dance courses I so wished to emulate. Many dance artists and teachers in universities across the USA generously provided me with information about courses in a range of dance studies that had been developed over many years. Their relationship with the dance profession and also with departments of Physical Education was of great interest to me. At that time most courses were still in ‘Phys Ed’ but from the University of California in Los Angeles to the Juilliard School in New York I could see how important it was to have our dance programs in departments devoted to the study of the Fine or ‘Creative’ Arts.

And so it was that in 1975 I began to teach in the drama department at Rusden College - now a part of Deakin University.  With the encouragement of John Ellis, then Head of the department, I was able to establish dance as a subject for students in their first year of what was to become a major in the Bachelor of Education degree. Getting the course written and accredited was a huge undertaking. Dance as a serious area of study in a tertiary institution? “You must be joking!” However, I had significant help and encouragement. From their eminent status in the arts and education both Dame Peggy and Dr Warren Lett supported me throughout the tortuous two-year accreditation process. It was finally accredited in 1977. Instruction and deep experience in dance composition was an important element in each of the four years of the B.ED degree and remained so for many years as other tertiary courses were conceived and established in universities and colleges across Australia.

By 1977 my first students at Rusden College were in their second or third year of dance and were able to participate in the memorable process that resulted in the formation of our national body. Among them were Mark Gordon, Robert Osmotherly and Robyn Sedgewick who all continued to make important contributions to the organization as it developed in its first few years.

The 1977 conference proved to be a watershed for Australian dance. It was attended by over 250 dance artists, students and teachers, from all over Australia. It provoked heated debate but also the most profound recognition of the interests that were shared, and those which induced conflict. In his opening address, Peter Brinson referred to the progress that had been made on an international front since his visit to Australia early in 1976. He said, ‘it is part of an international movement, an explosion of dance interest among young people, and it is something I have witnessed right across the world. What Australia is doing, what is happening in this room can be matched also in other countries in any continent, and this I think is part of the period of change and re-assessment in which we are living. Unless we step in now’ he said, ‘unless we take part in this reassessment, this thinking of change, unless we put our own house in order, we are going to miss out, and miss out for another decade. It is certainly true of Britain, and I suspect it is true here.’

In teasing out the issues of most concern, Brinson spoke of the situation in France, in Sweden, in Canada and the USA, and in Britain. Although his left wing sympathies had always ensured that he was never granted a visa to enter the USA, his contacts in Canada, and his wide reading, ensured that he was familiar with the progress being made, particularly with regard to the growing number of courses in dance in the liberal arts faculties of American universities. He referred to the initiatives then under way in British education and to the Gulbenkian Dance Study that was then receiving its first returns on information regarding the extent of dance education and training in Britain. He was ever hopeful, always visionary, always looking for the tools, the arguments that would serve the wider cause. ‘We don’t really know the first thing about ourselves’, he said, ‘how many we are, what we teach, how we teach it, and so on, and yet without this we are an army without intelligence, and thus without a strategy.

The language seems to echo his army days, but the metaphor was clear. There was a battle to be won and we had better be ready for it. The support given by the Gulbenkian Foundation in London to the acquiring of the necessary information or  ‘intelligence’ is widely acknowledged, as is the fact that many of the strategies subsequently devised to secure their implementation were directly inspired by Peter Brinson.

These themes continued to be thought through, and in 1993 he was invited to deliver the second Dame Peggy van Praagh Memorial Address at the ninth National Biennial Conference of Ausdance, in Melbourne, the occasion of his fifth and final visit to Australia. The Politics of Dance - Policy, Process and Practice, was hard hitting; realistic. ‘Not withstanding the history and significance of dance’, he said, ‘I can tell you that in Britain, dance receives in public subsidy, less than half the monies given each year to drama and music.’ He suggested that political misunderstanding and public prejudice were primary causes, and asked ‘How do we remove public prejudice? The audience of some 500 people who had assembled to hear him were not let off lightly. His recipe for acquiring political power on behalf of dance was stringent: An acquaintance with political theory; a concern for the content of choreography and therefore the influence of dance upon society; emphasis on the value of dance in blending cultural diversity; convincing arguments for the presence of dance in education; extending access to dance to all, including the disadvantaged and the disabled; and finally, a clear political strategy rooted in dance power and appropriate training for advocacy.

These are themes he had addressed in the passionately argued Dance as Education, published in 1991. They applied equally to Australia as to Britain. Most heartening was his conviction that the fledgeling organisation launched so hopefully in 1977 was now powerful enough to achieve these aims.

‘Ausdance’, he said, ‘embraces all aspects of dance from performance to teaching; from multicultural, social and recreational dance to the advancement of dancers’ health. Above all Ausdance focusses the cause and value of dance as a matter of concern for state governments and federal government: an organisation truly and visibly representative of the whole dance profession, possessed of dance power’.

The reaction to this ringing manifesto was surprise mixed with belated recognition. ‘Well yes, that is a clear description of what the organisation really does, let us proclaim it proudly!’ It is now quoted on the organisation’s publications and other documents. It took a Peter Brinson to show us that it was so.

 

Ausdance is now a proud part of our national story. Many years have passed and Ausdance continues to proclaim, and to work, for ‘the cause and value of dance’ in all aspects of its many responsibilities and functions.

 

In speaking of the three matters contained in my brief I hope I have shown how the beginning of Dance in tertiary education is intimately entwined with the story of the Summer Schools at the University of New England, as well as with the rise and rise of Ausdance. I am very pleased to have had the opportunity to speak of the influence of two of our great benefactors and visionaries, Peggy van Praagh and Peter Brinson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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1  Kenneth McMillan is quoted in Christopher Sexton, A Life of Dance, (Melbourne: The MacMillan Company of Australia, 1985), P.88.

2  Blazenka Brysha, ‘The Legacy of New England’, in Dance Australia, Issue 15, (March-May 1984), P.25

3 It was also intended that Dame Peggy van Praagh be part of this faculty but she was hospitalised with ongoing hip problems. Many of her commitments in regard to the coordination of the course were taken over by Shirley McKechnie.

4 Among those who took part in Brinson’s course in 1976 were Hilary Crampton, Hilary Trotter, Valda Craig and Michelle Potter who became well known contributors to dance writing and research in Australia. For their responses to the experience of the course see Shirley McKechnie ‘Voices from Australia: A Tribute to Peter Brinson’, in Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research (ed. Richard Ralph) Vol XV Number 1, OUP London 1997.