Careers in dance

This paper explores a large-scale international project, Accented Body, which involved partnerships across the arts industry, the tertiary sector, government and philanthropic organisations.

Professional or full-time dancers—and athletes—are at risk of burnout, so it is important to be aware of the warning signs and take action.

Professor Susan Street presented the eighth Dame Peggy Van Praagh Memorial Address alongside David McAllister, Artistic Director of The Australian Ballet. She explores some of the major challenges faced by the dance sector and reflects on some of the achievements.

Sue talks about the challenges of sustainability for contemporary dance in Australia, and argues that the notion of creativity should be at the core of future debates about the intrinsic, cultural and economic benefits of dance.

Postcolonial theorist, Homi Bhabha proposes an interstitial space exists in between polarities along axes of subjectivity. Georgie Boucher uses Bhabha’s notion of the interstitial subject to investigate how Umiumare might utilise strategically in-between subjectivities in performance.

Eleanor Brickhill reflects on a 2005 research project which was not intended to come to any conclusions, but to hopefully illuminate certain ironies or conflicts. She talks about "taste" and how it can create boundaries and divisions between people.

This is part 2 of a broad hypothoses of an intuitive science of dance. Elizabeth Dalman and neuroscience researcher Paul Howard Mason (1982 – ) joined forces to explore the evolutionary characteristics of a discrete social system, with a belief that choreography involves processes that expose the social machinery of human expressive systems.

Strategies for sustaining dance in the following papers occur from two perspectives: culturally in terms of preserving and contemporising traditions in India, Cambodia and Thailand; and pedagogically through strategies for life-long learning in the tertiary sector and improved teacher training for children.

For the first time in Australia there are national qualifications for the dance industry. Innovation & Business Skills Australia (IBSA), in consultation with experts in the dance industry, have created a new training package for the dance sector. It is called the Live Performance Training Package (CUA11).

Dr Kim Vincs (Deakin University, Melbourne) reports on her investigation into the reasons that dancers continue their practices and manage to sustain themselves in a bleak economic environment.

Liz Schwaiger (PhD Candidate, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne) looks at an underfunded and underresourced Australian dance industry. She talks to dancers about how they perceive the term 'mature dancer' and about how we might creatively develop hybrid microcosms of opportunity in a culture which does not highly value dance.

Sarah Rubidge PhD,(Senior Research Fellow, School of Visual and Performing Arts, University College Chichester) reflects on the practice-led research she did for her PhD in this keynote address, and how it led to a radical shift in her artistic practice—from live dance works to interactive installation works.

Dianne Reid (Dancehouse, Melbourne) writes poetically and fluently about her working processes and what dance means for her. As a dancer she reflects on the world through the instrument of her body. Her choreography is a montage of her other lives "public and private, past & present, actual & virtual, real & imagined, stage & screen, as live body and televisual body."

Dr Maggi Phillips (Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University Perth) examines the two ecologies of which human dance activity partakes within the frames of diversity, change and balance. Can environmental thinking shed any light on the problem of the sustainability of dance?

Shaun McLeod (Deakin University Melbourne) pays tribute to some of the people who have been vital to establishing and sustaining regular meetings for dance artists to practice improvisation as performance. He talks about the groups' activities and some of the values and artistic concerns that meld the disparate individuals and practices into a flexible but functioning community.

Martin del Amo talks candidly and elegantly about the way he makes work—how he begins, how he collaborates with others and how they "get things done".

Poetic reflections by Trevor about the work he makes. This prose evokes—rather than explains—the why, when and how of his devising processes.

Brain Lucas writes a generous, reflective musing on how even established artists are in a constant and continuing state of development and growth.

Julie-Anne Long takes us on a journey, through the inspiration, creation and realisation of a working process. She reflects on collaboration and the influence of place with a word skill that replicates her expertise as a dancing devisor.

Shelley Lasica talks candidly and elegantly about the way she makes work – how she begins, how she collaborate with others, and how they get things done.