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Australian Dance Awards

A glamorous night among the stars!
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Strut Dance: an excerpt from Decadance Perth 2016. Photograph supplied. 

 

In 1997 Ausdance NSW, with support from the City of Sydney and The Australian Ballet, presented the inaugural Australian Dance Awards at the Sydney Opera House. The event has settled into a round of the capital cities and was last held in Perth in 2012. [To see the list of winners, check out our Performing Arts Editor’s article: Indigenous artists a winner in dance awards]

I had been at another event in the afternoon, and barely had time to comb my hair before rushing off to the State Theatre in my daytime clobber, topped by bright red coat. A glamorous night among the stars! There is no way of disguising a bright red coat when virtually every other woman in the foyer is wearing serious glam: black skirts and tops with staggeringly high heels were the order of the evening. Three lovely ladies approached me within minutes to award me a trophy as winner of the ‘Best Red Coat’ division. I graciously accepted the 5.5cm gold plastic trophy and tried to shrink into the background, but it’s hard to shrink anywhere in a red coat when almost everyone else is wearing black! Alan Alder and Lucette Aldous, two of my beloved mentors and teachers were sitting close by. I was mortified.

The three lovely ladies, it transpired, were Amy Wiseman, Carly Armstrong and Jessica Lewis, collectively known as Unkempt Dance. Unkempt they were not: had there been an award for the Most Glam Girls, they would have won hands down. They were credited as ‘Trophy Assistants’ but they were far more than that. They were the link between awards and entertainment. Highly original and very, very funny, Unkempt Dance held the evening together with style and panache.

Seven other companies contributed to the evening. This made a very long night of it, but the variety was necessary. Nothing is more tedious than watching one person after another come up to receive a trophy and make a speech.

Before we went in to take our seats, the young people from Co3 strutted their stuff in the foyer. But they didn’t strut; rather, they kept their cool while performing introspective snippets of contemporary dance. Co3 was formed in 2014 when Buzz Dance Theatre & STEPS Youth Dance Theatre – although the latter still appears in its own right from time to time –amalgamated. For this event six dancers took part in an excerpt from the cry, their current production. The dancing of Katherine Gurr, Mitch Harvey, Zachary Lopez, Talitha Maslin and Russell Thorpe was excellent, and the intriguing score, played on stage by composer Eden Mullholland, was a bonus.

A couple of awards, and then Kristina Chan and Joshua Mu of Force Majeure gave us Kate Champion’s riveting piece, Never did me any Harm. Performed partly to a taped dialogue and partly to music, this dramatic piece got a huge ovation.

Two more awards, then came The Coven, a hip-hop style piece performed by an all-female cast of eighteen dancers. Its theme? Witches competing for power! K2 is a Perth dance school, run by Kristal Twight and Kristin Keighery, which bravely supports a company. The work was very professional, especially considering the age of the performers. They were both competent and confident, and did well to dance such a complex piece in chunky-heeled character shoes!

One more award, then a lovely In Memoriam, celebrating the life, inter alios, of Roy David Page, who posthumously won the award for services to dance as a composer and performer. Another was Ruth Galene, a Sydney dancer I knew and admired back in the seventies. I didn’t know she’d passed on, and seeing it on screen was rather a shock. Others were Leslie Newman, OAM; Andris Topp; Laurence Bishop; Margaret O’Halloran and Peter Sperlich. All these artists made lasting contributions to dance in this country, and are sorely missed.

A highlight of the evening showed up after interval, an amazing solo by Tasdance’s Robert Tinning. Titled Plain English, the work deconstructs speeches and interviews from Australian politicians, using their rhythm patterns, slogans and stutters to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between politicians and the media.

Got the sequence now? Two more awards and then a performance of Motion Picture by Lucy Guerin, Inc. Deliberately exploiting the melodrama tradition, this piece featured beautiful choreography, but the background words were somewhat distracting.

Awards for the Best Female Dancer (Elmer Kris) and the Best Male Dancer (David Mack) followed, then came an extract from the West Australian Ballet’s Radio and Juliet. I reviewed this piece at Ballet at the Quarry 2014, and was impressed. It is still impressive, and Brooke Widdison-Jacobs, is, if anything, better than ever as Juliet.

The final award was the climax of the evening: Terri Charlesworth took the Lifetime Achievement award for her services to dance. It was touching to see her granddaughter, Briana Shepherd, compering the show that climaxed in the honour given to her grandmother. Shepherd’s compering was unimpeachable: no less than one would expect from a dancer turned journalist and presenter for the ABC.

The closing piece came from Strut Dance: an excerpt from Decadance Perth 2016. Seventeen dancers, seated on chairs in a semi-circle, danced in unison, constantly in motion but hardly ever leaving their chairs except to remove their garments, one piece at a time. Yet one of them kept throwing himself to the ground while another kept standing on his chair momentarily. I will not pretend to understand what this piece is all about, but it was well-performed, and in a weird way, engaging and even enjoyable.

A congratulations to all the performers as well as the award winners!

Rating: 5 stars out of 5

2016 Australian Dance Awards​

Presented by Ausdance and Harlequin Floors
The State Theatre Centre of Western Australia
Sunday 18 September 2016​

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Carol Flavell Neist
About the Author
Carol Flavell Neist  has written reviews and feature articles for The Australian, The West Australian, Dance Australia, Music Maker, ArtsWest and Scoop, and has also published poetry and Fantasy fiction. She also writes fantasy fiction as Satima Flavell, and her books can be found on Amazon and other online bookshops.