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Moving Portraits

Beneath a tree also over a century old is where I meet dancer and artist Eileen Kramer, and where the 60-minute loop will end. And it feels fitting, on the heels of her recent death on November 15, 2024, at 110-years-of-age, to start here, at effectively the end of Sue Healey’s screening of On View: Icons. Showing at Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre, from 4pm in the afternoons onwards, as part of the launch of Dance (Lens) Mini the audience is invited to duck into the cool, dark reprieve of the theatre at any time and immerse themselves in a three-channel, cine-portrait of six Australian dance legends.[1] As timing has it, this is where I am to begin. As the familiar strains of the “Blue Danube” waltz lilt “let us dance,” Kramer imparts, “it’s been a long journey, but I don’t care about age, that means nothing to me; I’m more concerned about spirit, and the spirit has no age.”

Performance

On View: Icons, a film by Sue Healey

Place

Sylvia Staehli Theatre, Dancehouse, Melbourne, November 29, 2024

Words

Gracia Haby

Elma Kris in On View: Icons, a film by Sue Healey

Healey’s On View: Icons, a decade-long itself in the making, has distilled, through both camera and edit, the essence of six remarkable dancers, and they are so faithfully, and truly rendered, it is as if they are there before me.[2] As I pad through the darkness of the space and find a cushion on the floor, Kramer recounts her own delight at seeing a performance in the conservatorium which sparked within her the desire to dance. Her mother had taken her to a Gertrud Bodenwieser concert, and “there before my eyes, these beautiful girls, dancing. I said, oh! That’s what I’ve been wanting all my life: that created action!” Kramer went on to become a student under Madame Bodenwieser for three-years before becoming a member of her company, and having stepped in the fairy ring, never stopped dancing. As she silvers on the screens in triplicate, re-enacting the soft opening gesture of the “Waterlilies,” it is as if she too is part of a continuous loop, ever dancing. 

At the ‘actual’ beginning of part 1, I am met by Lucette Aldous AC,[3] former principal artist with Ballet Rambert and the Australian Ballet, who is sadly also no longer with us, and yet, she, also, radiates eternally. Filmed behind projected footage of herself dancing the role of Kitri alongside Rudolph Nureyev’s Basilio in Nureyev’s film version of “Don Quixote” (1973), she raises her finger up to the projected version of herself then, as if by doing so she will lift the extended leg up higher, almost as if playing with a little doll of herself. Part correcting and directing herself, in the spirit of always learning, always practising, always perfecting, always moving, always dancing, her eyes are focused on her recorded self’s arabesque. She moves to the side to use her finger to instruct her recorded self to raise her arm to fourth. Then, as if to signal, ‘yes, enough, lower, done’, she flaps both hands twice, and her recorded self follows suit. It is intimate to witness, and revelatory. 

Every part of Aldous, watching her earlier self dance, is unsurprisingly alert and responsive, but the focus of this moment catches me off guard and makes me consider my own posture, firstly, own purpose, secondly. “Don’t make it too difficult, even though it is,” says Aldous. “Make the audience feel they can get up and dance like you.” As captivating as the footage of Aldous as Kitri is, equally so, the footage of Aldous, as herself, on a deck by the water’s edge. With a blue patterned scarf wrapped around her head, framing her face, as she sinks her standing form to seated with fluidity, dance, like the spirit, has no age, it merely changes form.

As Healey comments in the accompanying program notes, about both the dancers themselves, and the series as a whole serving as an antidote to the impermanence of dance, “their bodies are precious archives, vessels of the liminal and the ephemeral… through these portraits, I aim to capture not only the physical presence and profound practices of all six dancers, but also their enduring legacies.”[4] Working with cinematographer Judd Overton, “On View: Icons” part 1 also pays tribute to Shirley McKechnie AO,[5] choreographer, director, educator and author, founder of the Contemporary Dance Theatre of Melbourne, founder of Ausdance, and Professor of Dance at the VCA; and Nanette Hassall AM, dancer, choreographer and teacher, dancer with Merce Cunningham Company and Ballet Rambert, founder of Dance Works, and Head of Dance Dept at WAAPA. To Elizabeth Cameron Dalman OAM, founder of Australian Dance Theatre, and founder of Mirramu Dance Company; and Elma Kris, dancer and choreographer, and member of Bangarra Dance Theatre, in part 2.

Just as the footage of all three icons—Aldous, McKechnie, and Hassall in part 1; Dalman, Kris, and Krammer in part 2—viewed each as a moving triptych at the beginning of both parts shows, you can repeat the same phrases, but they will always be different, they will always be unique to that one particular time. And so, an arm raised thus once, is an arm raised ever so slightly higher or faster or softer the next. Looking at the three full-length versions of Aldous performing alongside each other honours the repeated ritual. On the next screen, three versions of McKechnie commemorate the uniqueness, and on the third screen, Hassall can be seen arms folded across her torso, weight in her supporting right leg, body in three-quarter view, head facing forward, meeting my gaze. With a commanding, slight upward tilt of the head, three Hassels’ pose: there is no singular moment. In these narrow slices, painterly lit, a moment thrice is recorded to celebrate the variation of the ‘same’ movement. With each icon dressed in three different costumes, it becomes less a case of spot the difference, and more a case of behold the glorious variation of repetition. Because no one version can be the definitive version; they are all three versions, thirty versions, three-hundred versions, infinite.

Shot from above, on a black ground, images of Hassall become many as footage of her appears as if she is within a kaleidoscope. In the four corners of the frame, her hands appear, as she talks about if she were to make a work now it would be about borders. Holding the four edges of the frame, on all three screens, drawing my eye to the borders, Hassall, splintered, reveals that dance is “about movement; it is about travelling through space.” In a flutter of pages, for McKechnie, poetry, which has condensed an experience into a handful of carefully sculpted words, mirrors the search for the right image, the right phrase, the right way of relating an experience in dance.

To Kris, viewed across all three screens weaving through, as if one and the same, the tall pencil-like trunks of a gathering of trees, dance is about looking beyond the audience; it is about land, sea, and sky. “Dance brings me closer to my culture.” And as Dalman, with her wings dipped in yellow walks across a dried riverbed, dancers “have things to offer the longer we live, and it is always a challenge to keep finding, how can I express, move, in this body now.” As she describes how “suddenly the mountain fades into a pencil line” where earth becomes sky, the seventh ‘icon’ throughout the series is place/Country/landscape. With Dalman to my right, Kris to my left, and Kramer beneath the tree once more, in the layering of visual information, the whole is conveyed. When each icon communicates to the camera, or rather communicates directly to the audience, through the lens, distilled once more, the whole is not only rounded, but activated. It feels a remarkable magic to witness and feel.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

  1. Dance (Lens) Mini presented four screendance artists in Moving Portraits, a conversation and screening about dance, film, and portraiture, and the history and legacy of Australian women in dance. Throughout the discussion, Moving Portraits included screenings of Doing the Work (2024) by Siobhan Murphy, terra (installation 2024) by Cobie Orger with Alice Cummins, and was followed by a screening of Sue Healey’s On View: Icons.
  2. Healey’s On View project began in 2014 as a series of digital cine-portraits featuring dance artists Martin del Amo, Shona Erskine, Benjamin Hancock, Raghav Handa and Nalina Wait. I first saw On View: Quintet at Dancehouse in the upstairs studio as part of Dance Massive 2015.
  3. Lucette Aldous died at the age of 82, on June 5, 2021. The footage of her was first shown as part of On View: Live Portraits, Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, July, 2015.
  4. Sue Healey, On View: Icons, Melbourne season at Dancehouse, https://www.dancehouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/PROGRAM-NOTE-%E2%80%94-ON-VIEW-ICONS-by-Sue-Healey-%E2%80%94-27-30-Nov-2024.pdf, accessed November 28, 2024.
  5. Shirley McKechnie AO died at the age of 96, on September 5, 2022.

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