Innholdsfortegnelse for April-May-June 2022 i Dance Australia

THIS issue has a focus on auditions. Auditioning is a happy topic, full of optimism and hope. Unfortunately, for me it is also a topic that reminds of the limited number of jobs. In some areas, job prospects have improved lately. The commercial dance sector is burgeoning. Our three major classical ballet companies have actually expanded, albeit incrementally. But the contemporary dance sector is a different matter. Take a look at each of the main contemporary companies in the major cities. Australian Dance Theatre, despite its grand name, has just five dancers. Australasian Dance Collective has six. Co3 in Perth has 10; Dance North in Townsville six. Chunky Move in Melbourne – hard to tell, as it hires per project. Bangarra Dance Theatre is slightly better off, with fifteen. Even…

AFTER a long wait, the Australian Ballet's DanceX, a festival designed to bring together the Australian dance community, has been revived, enlarged and announced for October this year. Originally planned to take place in 2021 before falling victim to COVID-19 lockdowns, DanceX will give dance-lovers a unique opportunity to experience some of the nation’s top dance companies performing alongside each other at Arts Centre Melbourne. The original plan was to have showcased seven companies plus the Australian Ballet over two programs: Bangarra Dance Theatre, Sydney Dance Company, Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc, Australian Dance Theatre, Queensland Ballet and the West Australian Ballet. The new line-up will be eight companies over three programs: Australian Dance Theatre, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Chunky Move, Karul Projects, Lucy Guerin Inc, Marrugeku, Queensland Ballet and Sydney…

FOR dancers growing up in the information dense landscape of the ever-expanding cyber-space, it can be hard to know where to turn for advice, guidance or connection. However, a burgeoning online community is providing a space for dance students, professionals and educators alike to acquire knowledge, publicise issues and vent frustrations: the dance-meme instagram page. An unlikely pedagogical tool, I know. But hear me out. Before the recent years of lockdown-induced digital connectivity, dance-related memes were already becoming increasingly popular in the virtual sphere. A light-hearted way of laughing at industry clichés, dance memes appealed to those desiring to make the most of the internet’s satirical potential. But memes are not unique to internet culture. First coined by Richard Dawkins in his seminal text The Selfish Gene (1976), the term…

“Dancers . . . may not want to take up the position with us in the end. . . I believe we all end up where we’re supposed to be.” MANY companies do not hold open auditions. Aspiring dancers audition individually by simply making an appointment to take part in class. Some companies have a more nuanced and prolonged way to recruit new dancers, especially young, inexperienced dancers, ensuring that they are technically up to scratch but also philosophically and intellectually connected with the vision and aims of the group as a whole. Increasingly in the contemporary dance scene, that connection begins with the company’s training or apprenticeship programs, before a professional contract is offered. For example, Perth’s professional contemporary dance company, Co3, recruits some dancers through a secondment program.…

BREE KENT: Know your worth and, if you don’t know it, ask. DALE MOLLOY: Don’t say no to work, do every gig, any style, because you never know who you’re going to meet or what’s going got come out of it. YVETTE LEE: Treat yourself like an athlete, become versatile. Every choreographer wants to work with the most diverse dancers because the brief can change. You have to know your body well enough to execute anything convincingly.…

HOW much should a dancer be training at any given age? This is a really difficult question to answer, and like all difficult questions, the answer is always: “It depends”. However, hopefully I can give some general guidance about how to make a decision when it comes to your particular situation. I became interested in this question because I was seeing an increasing number of dancers coming through my clinic over the years with a couple of things in common. One - extremely high training loads on very young bodies – in excess of 30 hours a week of dance activity in dancers aged as young as nine; 2: significant performance pressure; 3: a very high competition workload. To be honest, I came through my own career as a dancer…

Where were you born? Melbourne. What was your first public performance? My first performance would have been in my lounge room! My first professional performance was a production of Coppelia as a seven-year-old student at the National Theatre Ballet School [in St Kilda]. I remember it like it was a second ago! All under the watchful eye of Miss [Gailene] Stock. Your career began at the Australian Opera Ballet, from where you went straight into ‘Phantom’. Did you have singing or music training? You even sang the demo track ‘Take it All’ for the movie ‘Nine’. When I originally auditioned for Phantom I had zero vocal experience and was completely out of my depth. I sang “Silent Night” out of a Christmas carol book. Needless to say I created my…

TIKTOK.It’s the social media app taking the world by storm, boasting over 700 million active monthly users and showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, the Chinese-owned platform outstripped Google as the world’s most visited site of 2021, and is currently gaining eight new users every second. The concept is simple: users create, share and discover short videos, ranging in length from three seconds to three minutes. Launched in 2017, TikTok’s mission is “to inspire creativity and bring joy” and in a mere four years has become a dynamic hub for fresh ideas from across the globe. From videos of cute animals, to fun workouts, to science experiments, “TikTokers” are finding endless new ways to express themselves and connect with likeminded creatives. And what is the one creative medium…

THIS year’s Sydney Festival should have been an inspirational celebration of art and culture. Instead, it was overshadowed by controversy. The cause? A boycott in protest against the $20,000 sponsorship provided by the Israeli Embassy, which was listed as the festival's “star” partner. Despite this being the first time the festival had been staged since the devastation of lockdowns, 30 artists withdrew, sacrificing their chance to perform for an audience. (Some went on with their shows, but not under the Festival umbrella.) THE sponsorship in question was for performances by Sydney Dance Company of Decadance, a work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, the former artistic director of Batsheva, the celebrated dance company based in Tel Aviv. Though the performances went ahead, the usual joyful spirit of the Festival was instead…

This insightful concept establishes a 21st century sensibility while retaining the soul of Tolstoy’s novel. AFTER several Covid-enforced interruptions, and a short season in Adelaide in July 2021, Yuri Possokhov’s Anna Karenina finally opened in Melbourne to a packed house. The dancers rose magnificently to the occasion and delivered a performance of the highest quality, thoroughly earning the ecstatic cheers and bravos of the Covid-masked opening night audience. Possokhov’s insightful concept, vision and choreography establish an avant-garde 21st century sensibility while retaining the heart and soul of Tolstoy’s epic 1878 novel. In a structured, concise, re-telling with a timeless contemporary relevance, Anna Karenina is a jointly commissioned production by the Joffrey Ballet and the Australian Ballet and premièred in Chicago in 2019. Tolstoy’s novel has been adapted for ballet several…

Set on a beach, this performance portrayed a classic, post-apocalyptic wasteland. JUST like Ivan Aivazovsky’s 1850 painting, The Ninth Wave, this production (of the same name), directed by Grayson Millwood and Gavin Webber of The Farm, explores the contrast between devastation and beauty. This 60-minute piece is set on a vast expanse of City Beach Park after sunset and involves a cast of nine adults plus the Co3 youth ensemble. With overturned cars and buried streetlamps, the beach portrays a classic postapocalyptic wasteland. The performance begins with a bang. As the audience found a spot on the sand to sit, two children can be seen in the distance, illuminated only by the flicker of the torches they are holding. The children follow the soft thudding of bass towards a sunken…

EAUTIFUL, talented and driven, Ako Kondo and Chengwu Guo are definitely an Australian glamour couple. Both principles of the Australian Ballet, where they met in 2010, and now about to have their first child, they have shared a little of their home life with Dance Australia. Home for the pair is a Southbank apartment, in the same neighbourhood as the company headquarters. But it wouldn’t be a home without their beloved toy poodles, Teddy and Choco. Describing the ’hood, Chen tells me: “Our favourite places are the South Melbourne Market, the Port Melbourne dog beach, those locations are just so perfect. Middle Park, Albert Park Lake – that’s where I proposed to her”. Apparently, Choco dropped the ring on the path in front of Ako one day on a walk.…

CAREERS in dance take many shapes and forms. Commercial dancers earn their living dancing in commercial projects, including tours, musical theatre, music videos, film and television, cruise ships and advertisements. Commercial dance is the kind of career where you might not always know what’s going to happen next, moving from contract to contract, but meeting one person or taking one opportunity can spark an incredible chain of events. For Bree Kent, a chance encounter with a celebrity led to eight contracts and dancing on world tours. Kent is the founder of Breeze Entertainment and creator of The Goddesses, a commercial dance show inspired by ancient Greek mythology that premiered in Melbourne in February, 2022. “You never know who is watching you when you’re dancing,” she says. “I was working as…

“And who would have thought a few weeks ago that all of this would happen? … we cannot remain indifferent to this global catastrophe.” IN the classical ballet world, Russia has been a holy grail. But with the invasion of Ukraine, many dancers are now leaving the country in disgust. Alexei Ratmansky was in Moscow at the announcement of the conflict, choreographing a new work for the Bolshoi Ballet, The Art of Fugue, scheduled for March. The premiere has now been “postponed” and the choreographer has fled to his home to the United States. Ratmansky was born in St Petersburg and is a former artistic director of the Bolshoi but he trained in Kiev and was a dancer at the National Opera of Ukraine. Since his return home, he has…

This is a perfectly realised work that celebrates the relationship between music and dance. ON my way to the Dunstan Playhouse to see Manifesto, I passed a troupe of Ukrainian folk dancers performing on the new Festival Plaza, their colourful embroidered costumes and ebullient dancing attracting a large crowd. Seeing them dance with such vivacity, in a desperate attempt to raise money to help their country withstand the atrocity being unleashed upon it, brought me to tears. It also made me muse on the question of why we dance. Stephanie Lake’s Manifesto, premiering at the Festival, is a powerful response to this question. In the program notes, Lake calls her work “A Tattoo to Optimism” and describes it as “a show about history, rebellion, obedience, joy, wonder and tenderness, as…

The challenges of the past two years have served as creative fodder for Guerin’s latest creation. LUCY Guerin’s latest show, Flux Job, was created in fits and starts. Sandwiched between Melbourne’s lockdowns and personal tragedies, the work was birthed on shaky ground. These forces and their attendant challenges have unavoidably shaped the project; serving as creative fodder for Guerin and her team to rationalise the events of the last two years. Much like its creation, Flux Job is a fractured experience for the viewer. In collaboration with theatre-maker Adena Jacobs, Guerin has pieced together a collage of choreographic structures and disjointed texts that oscillate between themes of freefall devastation and inertia, isolation and global collapse. Sombreness, too, pervades. And while some moments are compelling and dramaturgically accomplished, the work as…