Vale Shirley McKechnie AO

We record with great sadness the passing of Professor Shirley McKechnie AO, one of Ausdance’s founders and perhaps the most influential artist and educator in Australia’s recent history.

Shirley’s passion for dance, her unwavering faith in the ability and potential of young artists and educators, and her understanding of the core values of dance, made her one of our greatest and most articulate advocates and mentors. Her life was marked by generosity, intellectual rigour and support for artists across the whole dance spectrum.

Shirley was born in Melbourne in 1926 to a father who had survived service in World War I at the Somme and Passchendaele, and from whom she developed a lifetime interest in science and a passion for the Australian natural environment. Her life in dance was marked by the early influences of Bodenwieser training with artists such as Johanna Kolm (later Exiner), Margaret Lasica and Daisy Purnitzer, and where improvisation and choreography were central.

Her later seminal friendships with artists such as Dame Peggy van Praagh, Keith Bain and Kathryn Lowe, and with the UK's Peter Brinson and the Dean of Education at LaTrobe University, Warren Lett, greatly influenced her later teaching and research.

Shirley’s own career was marked by significant ‘firsts’:

• founder of one of the first contemporary dance schools in Australia in 1955
• founder of one of the earliest contemporary dance touring companies as director, choreographer and performer (Contemporary Dance Theatre of Melbourne 1963-72)
• founder of the first tertiary dance degree course (Rusden State College, 1977)
• a driving force behind the seminal Armidale choreographic seminars (1974–76)
• a founder of the Australian Association for Dance Education (Ausdance, 1977)
• a member of the Council of the Victorian College of the Arts (1974–88)
• assisted with the founding of the first professional dance education company (Tasdance, 1981)
• the founding chairperson of the Tertiary Dance Council of Australia (1985–86)
• interviewer and researcher for the National Library of Australia (1980s–90s)
• guest artist, The Australian Ballet (Nutcracker, 1992)
• National President, Ausdance (1992–94)
• inaugural presenter of the Peggy van Praagh Memorial Addresses (1991)
• founder of Green Mill Dance Project (1993–97)
• patron of the Australian Choreographic Centre (from 1996)
• received the first Australian Research Council grants for choreographic research, Unspoken Knowledges (1999–2001), Conceiving Connections (2002–2005) and Intention and Serendipity: Investigating Improvisation, Symbolism and Memory in Creating Australian Contemporary Dance (2005-2008)
• Professor of Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts (1998) and Honorary Doctorate (2007)
• an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the VCA/University of Melbourne.

As well as being elected an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998, Shirley received numerous awards in recognition of her services to dance in Australia, including:

• an Order of Australia in 1987 (OAM)
• a Kenneth Myer Medallion for the Performing Arts in 1993
• Ausdance 21 Award for outstanding and distinguished service
• two Australian Dance Awards, including Services to Dance Education (1997) and Lifetime Achievement (2001)
• a Centenary Medal (2000)
• made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2013 (AO).

Shirley led several seminal research projects from 1999–2008 that were at the forefront of a new research interdisciplinary area – dance and cognitive science. She had recognised – years ahead of other research groups – that the intellectual, creative and collaborative processes involved in the conception and development of dance works have much to offer psychology, sociology, anthropology, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience as a lens on human thought, expression, communication, problem solving and decision making.

Shirley and her multidisciplinary team investigated the processes involved in creating new dance works. She analysed and described the choreographer and dancers working together as a ‘community of creative minds’ and as a self-organising system, sometimes centralised and other items distributed.

Shirley crossed disciplinary boundaries and inspired others in the research team to do the same, a catalyst for breakthroughs in thinking across seemingly disparate academic disciplines, leading ultimately to dance connecting with science.

Shirley’s major concern was that audiences for contemporary dance needed to grow, and she therefore applied her research to understanding the ways in which audiences respond to contemporary dance works.

One hallmark of Shirley’s research was the productivity and diversity of output from each project. Sharing practical knowledge from these projects, she also wrote extensively on the value of multidisciplinary research and the challenges and possibilities it entails. Her research writing during the 1980s and 1990s, and her initiating and leading of large interdisciplinary research projects in Australia demonstrated her usual foresight and vision.

Shirley’s pre-eminence in national and international dance research, her leadership in dance scholarship, her ongoing mentorship of young dancers and choreographers and her unprecedented contribution to Australian dance and dance research have created a proud legacy for one of our most revered artists, educators, researchers and mentors.

Ausdance is proud to have been associated so closely with our founder and mentor, and as publisher of much of her research. This is a time to celebrate an extraordinary life, and to reflect on Shirley’s significant achievements.