Creating dance

Professor Shirley McKechnie OAM presented the inaugural Dame Peggy van Praagh Memorial Address soon after the first anniversary of Dame Peggy's death in Melbourne on 15 January 1990. She was the first a long line of dance artists and scholars who have, and will continue to, pay tribute to Peggy van Praagh in this way.

Jonathan Bollen explores the utility of actor-network theory for researching performance. The focus of his analysis is Australian Dance Theatre's Devolution created as a collaboration between choreographer Garry Stewart and robotics artist Louis-Philippe Demers.

Art historian Andrew Montana presents his perspective on the designs the young Australian artist Loudon Sainthill made for the ballets of the beautiful Russian ballerina, Nina Verchinina. The story of this collaboration, and the fate of Verchinina as choreographer is intriguing.

Mary Elizabeth Anderson gives an account of Tess de Quincey’s experiments in Bodyweather training, place-based performance-making and documentation at Hamilton Downs, an old cattle station and youth camp about 100 kilometres beyond Alice Springs.

Clare Dyson illustrates her account of proximity in the relationship of audience and performer with examples from her own intriguing choreographies. How close is close? What does being a member of an audience, as opposed to being an ordinary person in an ordinary place mean?