DANZ QUARTERLY Issue 16
July, August, September 2009
CROWS FEET
Still Dancing After All These Years
By Ann Hunt
Crows Feet, the Wellington-based all-women contemporary dance group for older dancers, recently performed its tenth anniversary programme of Leaving Home and Choros at the Wellington Performing Arts Centre.
Their first performance took place in 1999 at the Michael Fowler Centre Wellington, for the launch of Osteoporosis NZ. Since then, apart from their annual concerts, they have performed at many different events and are regular contributors to Wellington’s International Dance Day, running classes and demonstrations. In 2008 they performed at the Fringe Festivals in Wellington and Dunedin.
Its director and choreographer is Jan Bolwell - dancer, choreographer, writer, actor, teacher, cancer survivor, the list is impressive. She’s enough to make the average person feel highly inadequate, yet that is exactly what Jan is not about. If a single word could sum up her philosophy, it would be ‘inclusivity’.
Right from the beginning, anyone who wanted to join Crows Feet could do so. There were no auditions. However to join you do have to be over 35 years of age. Neither was it ever exclusively set up for women. As Bolwell explains:
“It’s just that they were the ones who turned up in the early days and hence it has evolved as a women’s group.” The youngest member is around 38 and the oldest is 69.
In 1998, after surviving two bouts of breast cancer, Jan began dancing again to aid her recovery. The result was Off My Chest, which was featured in Gaylene Preston’s film Titless Wonders. Some women who saw the film approached her and asked her to teach them to dance like that and the Crows Feet collective was formed.
But the idea of just doing a weekly dance class did not appeal to Jan. “I decided that it had to be creatively interesting for me,” she added. “So I determined right from the beginning, that I wasn’t just going to do a regular class. I was going to make work.”
The group, from its initial four members now numbering twenty, meets once a week, unless they are in the final stages of rehearsal for a new show, when they meet twice weekly and sometimes more often.
As Jan explained, “The women who come to class are all professional women and they’re incredibly busy. The last thing I wanted to do with Crows Feet was to make it something that was stressful for them. One of the ways to avoid this was to take a long time to create work. It may take a year. As soon as we finish one concert, I start the next.”
After ten years, Jan thinks it is possibly time to consider the group’s future direction.
“Previously, Jenny Cossey’s made one piece for the group, but basically it has been me doing the choreography and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of that, working with trained and untrained dancers – because there is a mix,” she said. “But in fact, I’m working on a new piece now, where I’ve said to them, okay, this is going to be our dance, not my dance and they’re devising virtually the whole work.”
Another aspect that she is considering for the future is more use of speech within the works. No stranger to this herself, in her own solo shows Jan has successfully incorporated this duality. She emphasised, “I’ve got such skilled people (in the group), like poet/novelist Rachel McAlpine and poet Jo Thorpe. We could actually write some of our own work. So that would be a direction that would be great for us.”
In any Crows Feet production the standard of props, set and music is always very high – something that is very important to Jan. “Although we’re a community dance group, that doesn’t mean to say that you don’t strive for professional presentation,” she said. “I owe it to the women and it’s also honouring the work we are doing.”
According to Jan, growing older and losing a certain amount of flexibility and spring should be no deterrent to dancing. “I think we shouldn’t talk about loss in a way because there are so many other things that replace that. It is something about their presence...a life lived. When I did Requiem, in memory of my sister Fiona, who died of breast cancer in 2006, I was enormously grateful to those women [who performed it], because they’re older they understood intuitively what loss is.”
Asked what she thought was the main value in giving older dancers a platform to perform, she said: “In Crows Feet, we don’t just pose around the stage. We dance. I think there’s a huge affirmation that comes from being able to move well physically. And I think for older women we often lose confidence in ourselves, about our whole physical image, how we are. So that in a very deep way, it seems to me that dancing out there in public is saying this is who I am, this is what I look like, this is how I can move, and it’s ok.”
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