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Dance Informa is the industry's online dance magazine and news service.

The Australian Government’s National Cultural Policy—Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place, is a 5-year plan to renew and revive Australia's arts, entertainment and cultural sectors. 

Revive was launched in January this year, and the federal Office for the Arts has now provided a progress report which will continue to be updated on this site.

Chunky Move position vacant—Executive Producer. Applications close 14 April 2015.

The NDF is the most significant platform for dialogue across the Australian contemporary dance sector. Dancers, makers, researchers, writers, directors, producers, advocates and educators participate in discussions about the inherent concerns and realities affecting current professional practice in Australia.

Safety, inclusion and mobilisation at the intersection of diversity requires urgent action. 

We believe change is a collective movement and everyone has their part to play in creating the inclusive, accessible and safe dance industry this country deserves.

The National Library of Australia will soon integrate the Australia Dancing service into the national discovery service Trove.

The WDA Asia Pacific AGM will be held in conjunction with Panpapanpalya, the joint dance congress being presented by dance and the Child international (daCi) and the World Dance Alliance Asia Pacific. With dance practitioners, advocates, educators and youth dance companies coming from all over the world, this has been an exciting project to plan, led by Dr Jeff Meiners and his Adelaide team, including Ausdance SA and many collaborating organisations. We all look forward to assisting with the program from July 8–13 this year. Registrations are still open, providing a rare opportunity for Australians to participate in a truly international dance event on home soil.

Dean Watson from the Australian Chamber Orchestra talks about the ACO's inaugural movement and sound workshop for secondary students with disability.

The Australia Council for the Arts joined with University of Sydney to undertake a longitudinal study on the impact of school, home and commuity based arts participation. The study, available through the Journal of Education Psychology, found students who are involved in the arts have higher school motivation, engagement in class, self-esteem, and life satisfaction.

BlakDance intern and dance and journalism student Ann-­Maree Long shares her experience of the performance Blakdance 2012.

Every year, for the last twenty years, Tracks Dance Company has been an integral part of the Darwin Festival. To celebrate this amazing milestone, the company looked to the sea and the sky of Darwin and created a dance work reflective of the warmth of Darwin and the popular local experience of ending the day with the setting sun. Last Light was performed against a countdown into the night, with a cast of local professional and community dancers.

Gabrielle Nankivell, the inaugural recipient of the Ausdance Keith Bain Choreographic Travel Fellowship, shares her travel story, research notes and workbook from Vienna, Munich, Barcelona and Berlin, where old and new influences shape her practice.

The subject of travel and professional development, and the value this experience offers artistic practice, arises regularly in the dance arena. As artists we seek these experiences because we are hoping to find something other than what we know or perhaps even something that makes us finally feel at home – either way, we are seeking something to ignite our imaginations and to deepen our knowledge and empathy. We hope to meet people, build new relationships and share practice. We imagine it will generate energy and feed our motivation. We take to the road to connect with others and to connect with our selves. To paraphrase the sentiment of many a wanderlust quote, travel opens the mind and makes the heart grow... We know and the philanthropists know. Travel and international exchange is a good thing.

Dancer, traveller and adventurer, Peter Furness muses about what makes Australian dancers unique and why so many are driven to foreign shores to find influence and employment.

Karen Veldhuizen shares her personal highlights from National Dance Forum 2015. 'I offer them to you as representative of the sense of belonging I found amongst the Australian dance community.'

Helen Herbertson provides some poetic reflections about the nature of her. This results in some beautiful, powerful prose that evokes, rather than explains, the why, when and how of her devising processes.

Marilyn Miller reflects on the importance of Creating Pathways National Indigenous Dance Forum, held at the National Museum in Canberra from 27 to 30 October 2005.

As soon as the lights and music started, I had this amazing feeling rush over me. It was then that I really knew that I was a part of something huge! Here I was, hours away from home, performing in a new town, right next to dancers from all over the country! Not only that, but I was dancing beside people from all different dance backgrounds and skill levels.

Both performances went so well that it was hard to believe we’d only choreographed the pieces a few days earlier. The show looked like we had been rehearsing together for months!

‘Dancing from the Grassroots’ was the title of the World Dance Alliance Global Summit, held last month at the Memorial University, St John’s, Newfoundland.

Ausdance National regrettably announces it will be winding up the association. The impact of shrinking government funding for the organisation, has resulted in dwindling reserves and severely limited resources. Despite significant fundraising efforts and organisational restructuring, Australia’s national advocate for the dance sector could not secure sustainable financial support.

The World Dance Alliance Asia–Pacific Dance Bridge 2015 created a dynamic and collegial space for dance makers, thinkers, writers and teachers to come together in Singapore. The Dance Bridge consisted of a symposium, choreolab, workshops, performances, and cultural tours of surrounding areas. Anja Ali-Haapala provides a little taste of her Dance Bridge itinerary.

Amanda Card is the editor of this edition of Brolga, which features articles by Garry Lester, Marianne Schultz and Lee Christofis. Michelle Potter pays tribute to two Australian dance icons who passed away in 2008—Valrene Tweedie and Meg Denton.

​Ausdance Queensland announces Kate Usher as executive director.

Tracey Brown and Sharon Teear, youth dance leaders from UK's Rubicon Dance, discuss their time at the 2006 Australian Youth Dance Festival with their youth dance group Nubrico.

The festival was great in exploring, sharing and learning different dance styles as well as sharing our passion for dance. Having the chance to go to Australia has been a fantastic experience for me and one that I will never forget! – Sophie

When Samara Cunningham attended the 2004 AYDF she was a Perth-based independent artist. Samara graduated from WAAPA with a Bachelor of Arts (Dance) in 1998. In this article she shares her experience of the Festival's choreographic development process and performance outcome.

In an important development for arts education research in Australia, the National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE) has negotiated with the National Library of Australia (NLA) to accept its archival material. After almost a year of cataloguing and sorting, the NAAE archive is now safely rehoused at the NLA from its original home in the Ausdance National library.

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".

Recent Asia–Australia dance theatre collaborations.

Harry Haythorne honours Sydney-based Mexican-Australian dancer and teacher Guillermo Keys Arenas who made an enormous contribution to multi-culturalism through the annual Folkloric Festivals which he directed from 1979 – 94.

It's standard Aussie holiday fare—families line the grassy foreshore, and picnics, cricket games and shrieking children abound. However, there are a few surprises in store along the foreshore on this particular Saturday. Scattered along the promenade are tents, caravans and campervans from a variety of eras, and 160 young dancers who dance in and around these temporary homes. This is Foreshore Cruisin', the performance that is the culmination of the 2009 Australian Youth Dance Festival (AYDF).

Due to COVID-19 and changed circumstances in studios, schools and community, many dance providers have chosen to move their classes online. Here is a guide to keeping people connected, moving and staying positive in challenging times. However, teaching online presents a new set of practical, legal and pedagogical considerations. This resource looks at these three areas and provides some ideas and suggestions. It has been prepared by Dr Katrina Rank, Director of Education and Life Long Learning at Ausdance Victoria.

Ausdance National April 2019 news and update

Tara Gower was an 18-year-old first year student at QUT Dance in Brisbane when she attended the 2004 Australian Youth Dance Festival (AYDF). She is now a member of Bangarra Dance Company. Here she shares her experience of the 2004 AYDF.

Dancer Josef Brown shares his experience of Palestine, its people and working with artist Nicholas Rowe in 2003.

Both Stephanie J. Hanrahan (Schools of Human Movement Studies and Psychology, University of Queensland) and Rachel A. Mathews (Creative Industries Faculty—Dance, Queensland University of Technology) have seen that both teachers and students can become frustrated when the rate of skills improvement is not satisfying. They had a group of salsa students engage in structured self-reflection and then evaluated the process and outcomes.

Co-artistic directors, David McMicken and Tim Newth give us an insight into the rich cultural context and its impact on Tracks Dance Company in Australia’s Northern Territory

This paper focuses on several issues in North American community dance; primarily its role in university education, and the influence of community dance on the art form of contemporary dance itself. Written from the personal perspective of a graduate student and community practitioner, the paper seeks to examine ways in which community arts methodologies are contributing to the evolution of innovative and trans-disciplinary curricula, while also touching upon some of the philosophical and aesthetic divisions that persist between professional concert dance and the community dance worlds.

The paper was originally presented on 15 July 2008, in conjunction with my colleagues Mary Fitzgerald and Satu Hummasti, as part of a panel discussion at the World Dance Alliance Global Summit, entitled Issues in Community Dance. Our panel sought to present a historical context of American contemporary dance and community practices, while also investigating certain aesthetic and educational values of the art form and its practice within this context. Within this frame, I chose to present a personal account of my experiences as a student, facilitator and community dance practitioner.

Anne Gollan speaks from personal experience about the great teacher Mischa Burlakov and his studio/home in Sydney during the 1940s and 50s.

Lee Christofis talks about the different cultural and social attitudes to dancing, and how dance featured in his childhood growing up in Greek-Australian family in Brisbane.

This story of the West Australian Ballet Company’s 1964 tour of the Northern Territory and the north-west of Western Australia is taken from a manuscript held in the National Library of Australia, Canberra. The provenance of the document is not clear but it is attributed to Kira Bousloff ‘as told to Val Green’ in 1964.

Belgium-based dance writer and photographer Marc Haegeman looks at some history and changes at The Kirov Ballet—for better or worse.

Felicia writes candidly about her experiences as a participant in the 2008 Asia Young Choreographers Project (AYCP) in Taiwan.

Here is the longlist of nominees for 2016 Australian Dance Awards in Perth, September.

Pauline Manley investigates eclecticism and variance in relation to personal practice, academic and public pedagogy and the Continuum performance model.

Kath Papas talks to two community dance pratitioners from opposite sides of Australia, about their views on some ‘bigger picture’ questions relating to community dance.

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.

This article discusses participation in a group dance improvisation practice over time. Described, is a regular dance practice and how it is the dancing over time itself that is the situation in which something is ‘going on’. Participating or acting in this practice allows ways of thinking, understanding, experiencing, knowing that exist only while or at least because of the participation in this dancing. The term ‘action’ as suggested by Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition, is used as a concept with which to think through the dancers’ experience in a shared practice. Other ideas including Claire Bishop’s participatory art and Tim Ingold’s discussion of ‘drawing together’ are explored to define participating in dancing in a studio practice, and to articulate what is happening and how that participation can be observed.

Identifies four ambitions for 2012, with a list of achievable objectives. These ambitions reflect the diversity and dynamism of dance in our communities. They require our energy and attention to ensure that dance, as an artform and an enjoyable form of recreation for all, remains at the heart of Australian life.

Naatayasala Hun Lakorn Lek, a Thai classical performing art, is a combination of human dance and puppet performance. Despite high competition with other modernised shows in the rapid changing society of Thailand, this group of performers have undertaken many adaptations and managed to maintain the existence of this art. The puppets have been developed to be more technical, more sophisticated and special effects and interaction with audiences incorporated. Modern marketing and management systems have been introduced. The continuing existence of this art form is evidence of how Thai artists have brought in modern knowledge and technology, while maintaining the valuable meaning and beauty of ancient Thai wisdom.

Australians and those who connect with Australian dance experiences in one way or another need to know that their ideas, memories and research are valued as the vibrant electricity to keep the dancing-talking duo spinning on through time. This issue of Brolga, edited by Associate Professor Maggi Phillips gives a sense of the multiple voices and approaches that weave into the repertoire of Australian dance, its history, present and future.

A list of Ausdance National founders and honorary life members.

This article looks at a particular moment in the practice of improvisation when the individual is still attending to unique or specific needs. In time, it comes before preparations that involve others, or the doing of something that is organised into an ‘exercise’. A practice rarely begins at zero moment with a group of improvisers arriving together with everyone ready to start. An allowance is made for a transition, and what the improviser chooses to do during this time is left up to them. This is the moment I am calling–‘warming up’ or ‘to warm up’. Taken literally the expression ‘to warm up’ indicates actions a dance improviser can do to prepare their body to improvise; a body-based preparation to attend to particular bodily needs in order to be physically ready to do dance improvisation.

Includes information about the upcoming 2019 National Dance Forum Program and more 

This essay incorporates a poetics for a blended set of practices, exploring a question posed by Louppe: ‘what path does the artist follow to reach the point where the artistic practice is available to perception, there where our consciousness can discover it and begin to resonate with it?’ 

I focus on an embodied dance of myself as writer, tracing a path to the availability of perception of this work, moving from a 5Rhythms movement practice that reminds me I have a body, to my first gestures towards beginning to write with pen and paper again after a period of depression, and the accidental witnesses/audiences I attract for a daily practice that slowly, gradually becomes a consciously framed performance practice. Along the way, I document a series of performances, from Lake Tyrell in Victoria’s Mallee region; to Federation Square in Melbourne’s central business district; to the public streets where my performance practice continues today.

The dance of the writer, for me, comes to embody a three-dimensionality of poetry, one that reveals to me new tools for writing and a blended practice of writing and dance.

Reports indicate that dance-learning experiences provided for young people in and outside schools impact positively upon young people’s learning in schools, as well as in pre-service and professional development programs for those who teach dance in various settings. Support of major dance organizations as well as the goals of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) affirm the importance of dance education and encourage the research and practice to provide lifelong and intergenerational learning in, about and through dance education. This paper describes the results of a survey questionnaire, which captures the narratives and contexts from lived experiences of university students and graduates in formal, informal and non-formal settings and how those are experienced. This initial study confirmed the power of dance and the significance of dance in peoples’ lives as well as deficiencies in the provision of dance for many.

Maggi Phillips gives an insight into Ted Brandsen, the Dutch dancer and choreographer who was Artistic Director of WAB from 1998 – 2001.

Li Cunxin, author of Mao's last Dancer, pays tribute to Peggy van Praagh and how some of her aspirations match his own: perseverance, resilience, determination and courage.

Marianne Schultz (University of Auckland) talks informally and passionately about the ground-breaking company Phantom Limbs during the 1970s and 80s.

Jonathan Marshall has edited this account by Shona Dunlop MacTavish of her experiences in the Phillippines in 1971, when she received a grant to research the dance of 12 tribal groups thoughout the country.

Australian participants in International Young Choreographer Project share the challenges and surprises of producing a work in unknown circumstances, in a limited time-frame, and with unfamiliar dancers. Learn how it changed their choreographic and artistic processes.

Yukihiko Yoshida (PhD Candidate, Graduate School for Media and Governance, Keio University) began work on creating an interdisciplinary dance research network in Japan in 2000. Although the technology to which Yuki refers is now mostly obsolete, his story is interesting from an historical perspective.

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.

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.

Nina Melita gives an account of Pavlova's first Australian tour, during which the famous dancer astounded her audiences with her artistry and passion. Pavlova was an honest and outspoken person who did not particularly enjoy attention from the press.

At a showing at Critical Path in 2011 Erin Brannigan responded strongly to Paul White’s performance of Martin del Amo’s work-in-progress, Anatomy of an Afternoon, believing it to signal a new direction for the choreographer. She shares her thoughts on the transposition of del Amo’s movement style as witnessed in White’s performance.

Secondary school dance teacher, Lynettte Haines talks about the dance program at Golden Grove High School in Adelaide, and the work they made for their exciting Asian tour.

March 2019 News

Following on from her article in Brolga 30 about Pavlova’s first Australian tour, Nina Melita investigates audience reaction to the second and final tour in 1929. She talks about the effects on the community, aspects of Pavlova’s personality, personal life and Pavlova's views on the arts in Australia.

Meryl Tankard pays tribute to Peggy van Praagh, and to all those influential individuals who have enriched her life—professionally and personally—with their own knowledge.

Amanda Card talks about her research with Martin del Amo on Anatomy of an Afternoon which was part of a project funded by Critical Path's Responsive Programme. The intent of Martin’s research was to expand and challenge his choreographic process by using a historical source as stimulation as well as experimenting with the transference of his particular choreographic framework onto another dancer.

This is the fourth part of Tamara Finch’s story of her career as a dancer. The first three parts were published as ‘My dancing years’ in New York in Dance Chronicle, Volume 27, Numbers 1 – 3, in 2004. Part three concludes with the decision of Finch (then Tamara Tchinarova) and her mother to remain in Australia at the end of the 1938 – 39 tour by the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, and with an account of some of her early experiences in Australia including her time with the Polish-Australian and Kirsova Ballets.

Kira Bousloff's name is synonympous wth ballet in Western Australia. She was a consumate performer and a personality to be reckoned with. This paper proposes that she saw her life as romance or fairytale, and tended to ignore the historical, political and cultural complexities of her creative enterprise.

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.

Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre (1979–1989) was a significant company in the development of dance in Ireland, and the first state funded contemporary dance group. For a period, the company were leading innovators in the country in contemporary dance and explored the boundaries of what constituted the dance form, leaving a lasting impact on Irish dance heritage, although relatively little has been written about their work to date. This paper explores the context for the company’s work, discussing the relationship between the body and language in Irish social, political and cultural history. Specifically, I focus on their production Bloomsday based on James Joyce’s Ulysses, which reveals key issues about the relationship between body and language in the company’s work.

In seminal investigations, researchers from the Victorian College of the Arts and the Universities of Melbourne and Western Sydney collaborated with dance artists and scholars to explore the nature of thinking in the embodiment of kinaesthetic, cognitive, emotional and aesthetic perceptions.

The Australian performing arts collective Remnant Dance has a partnership with a charity organisation that supports an orphaned community in Myanmar (Burma). The creation of a contemporary dance film with this community generated a performance in which young Burmese participants were encouraged to tell their own stories. The film was set in an abandoned glass factory in Myanmar, using glass as a metaphor for a surface that invites reflection as well as open transparency with the young people from the children’s centre. The story of making the dance film Meeting Places offers a case study for reflection on ideas of interconnection through dance making; and a site for engagement with social justice concerns within diverse communities. The creation of new dance through cross-cultural, multi-arts forms and inter-disciplinary contexts enables narratives to emerge through the frontline of dance’s unique communication.

West Australian Dalcroze expert, Joan Pope OAM establishes how much of an enigma Mary Whidborne is today, because it seems that she was the first significant teacher of Dalcroze Eurhythmics in this country.

This paper is a conversation about building depth in our relationships with our bodies and our meeting points with each other. Framed within the context of an improvisational dance practice, the authors, Dianne Reid and Melinda Smith, reflect upon their long-term shared dance practice, their evolving performance work, Dance Interrogations, and the cultural shifts possible as a result of long-term artistic practice. Their unique, long-standing collaboration (over six years and continuing) is unique in Australia and internationally. It is a collaboration which challenges deeply held beliefs around the low expectations of people who have a disability and explores the choreographic potential in the body and artist who experiences Cerebral Palsy—a condition affecting the muscular and skeletal system and which can make voluntary movement such as that in dance, difficult. Their practice itself constantly shifts between artistic formats in both studio and performance contexts, and draws upon a range of technologies familiar within the cultures of screendance and disability. This account is improvisational, an undoing of structure, to encourage other angles and depths of perception.

Susan Whitford explores the home-grown nature of West Australian Ballet and the outward-looking strategies that the company embraced. WAB experienced a long list of significant directors and choreographers (both Australian and international) who led the company from strength to strength.

Dr Sally Gardner (Deakin University Melbourne) considers some problems of conceptualisation in modern dance studies. She questions the assumptions made about the terms 'dancer' and 'choreographer' and the relationships between them, and wonders how this pair of terms work to structure what gets written or said in contemporary modem dance scholarship.

Dance critic Kevin Ng talks to Professor Susan Street about her experiences as Dean of Dance at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

Hong Kong dance critic Kevin Ng talks to freelance choreographer Natalie Weir at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, just before the premiere of her new work Turandot.

Melissa Blanco Borelli uses some of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s postmodern philosophical ideas of becoming, and Elspeth Probyn’s provocative conceptualisation of belonging, as ways to theoretically read choreography.

This is a working paper in process. It is concerned with the changing status of disciplinary knowledges, in dance and performance, in Australian universities. Although I have been working as an academic within the fields of dance and performance studies for some twenty years, it is only relatively recently that I have begun to reflect critically upon the disciplinary identity of dance studies and dance research, and with some more concrete sense of how these endeavours might be engaged differently.

Cheryl Stock, Artistic Director of Dancenorth (1984–1995) talks about a large-scale site-specific community dance project specially devised for the Townsville community in 1994. Originally published in Dancers and communities: a collection of writings about dance as a community art

Efforts to maintain and protect the environment have recently gained notable attention. Scientists, philosophers, educators and artists, among many others, have initiated positive actions that seek to change the ways that humans relate to the ecosystem. As well, members within the dance community have inadvertently established new movement values that seek to promote and encourage ecological balance. New ideologies in environmental ethics support a non-anthropocentric value theory that recognises the intrinsic value of all species to the function of an ecosystem. In this paper I show that environmental dance can be an artistic experience in nature that upholds contemporary environmental ethical values. I evaluate past personal choreographic choices, examine movers who explore the concept of ecocentrism in somatic practice, and present a possible ideology for environmental dance artists rooted in the act of ‘listening’. The role of aesthetics as a philosophy for art and nature and how it applies to social art making and environmental ethics is explored.

Jacqueline Simmonds interviews David McMicken at Tracks Dance Collective, Brown's Mart Community Arts Project, Darwin, November 1995.

The key message of the paper is that while observing a person moving, somatic and sensory processes are elicited and these have an impact on both the observer and the mover. The recognition of these processes is important to assessment, observation and clinical therapy protocols. The paper describes embodied awareness, including methods used in Authentic Movement, Dance, Dance/Movement Therapy, Body Psychotherapy, Body-Mind Centring, Sensory Awareness and Jungian Analysis. Arts-based practices can inform clinical practices, and embodied interaction in clinical practice can also inspire artistic research. The methodology of kinaesthetic attunement weaves subjective and objective experiences and can inform clinical relationships, childcare and educational practices.

Robin Grove talks eloquently about one of Australia's "star" ballerinas during the '50s, Lynne Golding.

Marilyn Rowe pays tribute to the woman who not only had an enormouse impact on Marilyn peronally, but whose creative influence fostered and nurtured Australian talent, and who imbued her dancers with a confidence and belief in themselves which allowed them to excell both nationally and internationally.

Paulo Freire and John Dewey are helping the youth of Cabelo Seco in the southern reaches of the Amazon to reclaim their violated community. Freire (1921–1997) and Dewey (1859–1952) remain alive in Cabelo Seco, identified as one of Brazil’s most dangerous communities. After describing the context of Cabelo Seco, the local community arts projects and the philosophies driving this work, I examine meanings of community dance in Cabelo Seco. Utilising a constructivist methodology that values dialogic interaction to build shared understandings, interviews and observations provide insights into diverse ways that people experience, value and make meaning from dance in community contexts. Dewey, Freire, Eisner, Boal, Zequinha and other arts educators are ever present in Cabelo Seco; understanding a lineage of influence helps to examine current practices and envision future projects. This paper explores the shifting and emerging role of dance in this community, focusing on how dance is helping to reclaim it.

This paper examines the dances and performance spaces created by classical Indian dance patrons and performers, who were moulded into the nationalist mode, premeditated by the bureaucrats and consequently fabricated by the traditional masters, i.e. the gurus. In the absence of an academic institution for dance studies, the non-performers, the bureaucrats and intelligentsia created dance scholars who ultimately furthered the nationalist idea of a glorified dance history. Odissi dance, post independence, reconstructed in its neo-classical avatar, by traditional master-performers, came to be practised mainly by urban women who later became the carriers of the dance form. The paper questions the resultant historiography and engages in a dialogue with the dancers to study the malleability of its boundaries, as established by the gurus and transmitted thence.

Julie Dyson and Cheryl Stock discuss Australian Dance in Shifting Sands: Dance in Asia and the Pacific.

This research investigates the studio processes of seven Western Australian choreographers to develop case studies that unpack the memories, emotions, and sensations that illuminate creative decision making in experts. These dance professionals participated in Natalie Cursio’s With A Bullet: The Album Project (2006-7; 2013–4) that invites them to recall the first song to which they ever ‘made up a dance’, and to use this piece of music as a springboard for, and soundtrack to, a new piece of choreography.

The study uses qualitative measures of phenomenological and somatic modes of attention to examine choreographic cognition, with a focus on ‘knowing how’, and other manifestations of ‘feeling’ that a decision is ‘right’, in order to illuminate creative decision making in choreography. I use the choreographers’ memories, emotions, and sensations to interpret their strategies for problem solving in the complex physical, emotional and social space of the studio. Memories and knowledge can take the form of tacit understandings performed during the process of transmission from choreographers to dancers, offering alternative ways of knowing and articulating creative processes.

Cursio’s With A Bullet offered a unique opportunity for choreographers to reflect on their own development as artists, and the research presented here makes a contribution to the ongoing task of placing embodied knowledge on a par with that expressed through linguistic propositions.

With a particular interest in the ways that dancers reflect social, cultural, political and economic currencies, Ananya talks about the intersection of dancing, dance studies and social justice work. Many of her questions come from experiences of art-making that encompass a broad range of race, gender, class and sexuality.

In this peer-reviewd article, Dr Mark Carroll (lecturer at Elder Conservatorium of Music) talks eloquently about the cultural effects of the Australian visits of the de Basil Ballet Russes, focusing on the symphonic ballets of Leonide Massine.

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.

In this paper I discuss the development of compositional methods in ballet and draw on my research into choreographic processes that have focussed on somatic awareness of ballet principles and their pedagogic underpinnings. Both Balanchine and Bournonville’s legacies offer compelling evidence of the symbiotic relationship between the development of academic and choreographic form in ballet (Crow/Jackson 2007). Sylvie Fortin (2003) contends that cross fertilisation between somatic and dance practice fosters individual creativity. Arguably ballet, which is defined by robust repertoire and principles, offers an apt model for investigating a choreographic pedagogy that also accounts for the somatic experience of the dancer. In the discussion, I use the example of a ‘shared’ solo from my recent choreography In the Reveal (2007) to consider the layering of personal and shared histories, multiple authorship and the somatic challenge to traditional methods of ballet creation. I reflect on a parallel approach in my teaching that draws principles of ballet spatial grammar, which I have conceptualised as frameworks for exploration of movement and expression. The ‘first person’ dimension and focus on principles shifts the emphasis in choreographic exploration away from the plastique or ‘what the body can do’, towards an inter-relational construct of the dancing as flow between sites of knowledge. The paper moves towards articulating the compositional methodologies emerging from the dancer’s personal dialogue with ‘objective’ ballet texts.