When I first skipped gaily into Melbourne over a year ago, I was just a young (ish) girl with dreams of dancing, choreographing and teaching. I would win everyone over with my humour and general fabulousness before I dance step had even been performed! My dance peers in the UK were all "Big fish in small pond....", "European modern dance scene...", "Experienced choreographer....". And the most uttered "You will be different and new".
New and different are not words which enter the vocabulary of the Melbourne dance scene. No capital letters needed for dance scene as there is no such thing here. No dance community either. It comes to this. Either you are highly commercial and can enter your dance style into various performance platforms. But think old fashioned jazz ballet meets Irish Dancing meets lap dancing. With funny costumes.
Or you squeeze your way into the highly exclusive contemporary dance scene. Membership is highly secretive and you can only get in to this from the ground up. So when you were five years old you did creative dance lessons and moved on from there.
I am obviously in neither of these categories and have been Melbourned into submission to try and join in somehow. So for the moment I am going to put forward a piece for Short + Sweet Festival. The only thing is they want a 2 minute preview by next Saturday. Into the dance studio and out of me tumbled all the creativity I had been saving for one year. Thank god.
I don't know what to expect, but I'll do my thing, my way, in any case. The panel might be full of people who were still in high school when I won my first choreographic award in 1996, so I will try my hardest not to laugh. Or slap them.
No comments:
Post a Comment