Dance Lineage — the passing of movement memory from body to body

With Trisha Brown leaving this mortal coil last week, my thoughts turned again to my/our family tree of dancers.

Russell Dumas, who you worked with last week, worked with Trisha Brown. He also co-founded Sydney company Dance Exchange with one of my teachers, Nanette Hassall, who had danced in the Merce Cunningham Company. Nanette founded the Melbourne company Danceworks, which I was a dancer in under the Artistic Directorship of Beth Shelton and Helen Herbertson. Helen spent some time studying with Trisha Brown and brought something of that aesthetic into her work with Danceworks. She also brought Lloyd Newson, Artistic Director of London company DV8 to work with us which also influenced the aerial/climbing works (Physical Business and Vagabonds and High Flyers) that Helen and the Danceworks dancers collaborated on in the mid-nineties.

While I undertook my Dance Degree in the 80's (SACAE/Adelaide University) my teachers included: David Roche, who danced with Pearl Lang, who had danced with Martha Graham; Simi Roche who was accepted into the Martha Graham Company; Steve Paxton (founder of Contact Improvisation) with Lisa Nelson (Editor of Contact Quarterly); Elizabeth Cameron Dalman who was the founding Artistic Director of Australian Dance Theatre; Deborah Hay with whom my dance colleague in Danceworks, Ros Warby, works with regularly.

So when you are dancing my material you are also dancing the traces of all of the above...
There are physical imprints that stay with us and which intertwine with our personal experiences/aesthetics to create our own particular ways of dancing. So you have a great legacy supporting you...have a look at some of their bodies of work to see the connections (see the links I have inserted in this blog).

You could also say that the studios we work in hold those traces.
In 2005, while I was Artistic Director at Dancehouse, I made a film/community project called
Dance Path. It was a video collage of the living history of Dancehouse with twenty-two independent dance artists dancing their recollections of practicing and/or performing in the studios there. It includes the above mentioned Helen Herbertson and Ros Warby, as well another Deakin face, Shaun McLeod.