“Sing the past”… in a place like Tasmania where the past is just below the surface of every community, the phrase can conjure up a myriad of images and memories.
For Tasdance – Australia’s only dance-in-education company – Seinn O (Sing the Past) focuses on the last 10 years, celebrating the company’s artistic growth since its establishment in 1981, and the ways in which it has enriched the lives and imagination of both the dancers and their audienxes.
Few Tasmanians would be unaware of Tasdance’s existence; the company’s extensive programme of residencies in schools has introduced more than 23,000 children to the delights of dance, and the company regularly performs in Launceston and Hobart. as well as in Melbourne.
One of these schoolchildren caught the vision and recently joined Tasdance as its first tasmanian-born member.
Shane Jessup, from Scottsdale, joined Tasdance after graduating from the Victorian College of Arts last year. Now 21, Shane spent four years at the college, during which he danced and choreographed for the Spoleto Festival and the st Kilda Festival.
To celebrate its first decade, the company earlier this year presented Turning 10 – a programme selected from a repertoire of 91 innovative and challenging works created for it during the last 10 years.
Turning 10 toured the North and North-West in May, visiting Devonport, Ulverstone and Burnie, and Deloraine and Queenstown high schools, where it was received by small but appreciative audiences.
The three works presented in Turning 10 were Boxes, Orville’s Outing and Superheroes – works that proved most popular during the past decade.
This month Tasdance is presenting Sing the Past – a dazzling programme of three new works and one repeat, in Melbourne, Launceston and Hobart.
The Melbourne season was from October 3-5 and 10-12, and received enthusiastic reviews in the Age newspaper.
Critic Neil Jillett hailed the company as one of international standard. “and its choreography and performance are among the best in contemporary dance…in recent years.”
Sing the Past takes its tit;e from a work created by Melbourne choreographer Sue Healey, who has spent the past few months working in New Zealand and New York.
Seinn O (Sing the Past) is a complex work weaving its way through the rich and fertile ground of Healey’s Celtic ancestry.
Programme notes state that: “Set to a sound collage that spans four generations, Seinn O is a tantalising look at the way in which our past may influence us.”
A work from the company’s past – Neil Adams’ Lunar Return – which had its premiere in Melbourne two years ago, opens the programme.
In Lunar Return, the dancers explore space, becoming orbiting planets and bits of debris, astronauts learning to handle weightlessness, and the hidden mysteries of black holes and the Milky Way.
“In this dramatic and poetic work Adams shapes and places the dancers’ bodies and movements to suggest all this in a constant swirl and surge of patterns,” Jillett wrote.
Neil’s second work, Gotta Go, is a complete change of pace and mood, bopping to the music of Joey de Francesco’s Dr jekyll, to suggest today’s frenetic pace of life, always in a rush, no time for contemplation.
The final work, Nanette Hassall’s Or is It? takes a penetrating look at grey faceless bureaucracies and the human spirit buried within them.
Set to a haunting score, Terry Riley’s Half Wolf Dances Mad in the Moonlight, Or is It? hints at the endless possibilities of an unfettered spirit.
After ten years of growth as Australia’s only dance-in-education company, Tasdance’s artistic director jenny Adams, administrator Anne Greig, choreographer Neil Adams, rehearsal director Jon Burtt, and dancers Toby Bell, Jennifer Clayton, Shane Jessup, Cate O’Brien, Ana Smith and Sophie Yesberg are evaluating the past and looking at new directions.
They are not planning to move away from their highly successful work in schoolds, but are looking at other developments – encouraging community-based theatre, and particuclarly, allowing the dancers to choreograph themselves.