Alys & Vicki talk about Dancing in Melbourne

Melbourne has a pretty good reputation among New Zealand artists, being the artistic capital of Australia, it’s a city that presents us with the opportunity to extend our work and soak up new styles of practice and performance. One day in June 2004 Alys Longley and Vicky Kapo met up by chance on Karangahape Road, Auckland. In their ensuing conversation it was revealed that they were both planning to move to Melbourne that very weekend. On the 26th of October 2004 Alys and Vicky met up again, this time at Vicky’s house in Fitzroy, to discuss their experiences with Melbourne dance, and the differences between dancing in New Zealand and dancing there.

Vicky: After 5 years of being a freelance dancer, you find yourself going round and round in circles. I felt unclear about what I could offer the New Zealand dance community that would financially sustain me, and what the dance industry could provide. After the last work that I made I realised there had to be a different way of making work. For awhile I wasn’t sure that I wanted to dance or make work again. It took me 6-8 months to find some sort of enthusiasm, or desire, even. And I guess in some ways it came down to being somewhere where I could have the right to fail if that’s what I decided to do, or the right to not dance. I needed freshness, and new processes, and a new balance between sustaining myself financially and in my artistic practice.

Alys: “I had a clear idea of what I wanted to focus on in Melbourne - Contact Improvisation, and Butoh. I’d done classes with Tony Yap and Yumi Umimare when I visited here earlier and came over intending to do as much as possible with them. I also knew I wanted to attend as many contact/ somatics/ improvisation classes and workshops ss I could at Cecil Street Studio. I came over in time for two things - a three day intensive at Cecil Street Studio with G.
Hoffman Soto, who works intensively with Anna Halprin at Tamalpa Institute in San Fansisco, and a dance research Conference at Deakin University. Soto’s workshop was great for weaving Feldenkrais, Ideokinesis, improvisation and dance therapy concepts, and the Conference was packed with Australian and New Zealand dance academics, who spoke on an eclectic range of topics. Here it was clear that serious postgraduate dance research isn’t as ludicrous as it sometimes seemed to me, when I was such a tiny minority in New Zealand. Dancehouse in Melbourne has been a point of return. Dancehouse offers support for independent choreographers- classes, workshops, rehearsal space, curated performance opportunities.

Alys: Dancing with Tony and Yumi’s Butoh Company as part of the Fringe Festival was really challenging and exciting. Just working with a fourteen-strong core company, most of whom had many years experience, for a continuous period, and being part of the Dancehouse Fringe Season, was great. The experimental / alternative dance community is so strong in Melbourne, and really inclusive. Cecil Street Studio is constantly offering open
workshops so possibilities to get involved and to specialise are open to everyone. Cross-fertilisation with other artists and interested people is always happening - in New Zealand I often felt my lack of professional dance training kept me apart from the dance community, so I enjoy hanging out with other dance makers/ thinkers who share a more eclectic background.

Vicky: Doing more of my classes at Chunky Move Studio’s I found I missed the flow of influential New Zealand dance teachers, that actually I need work from a more old fashioned school, that releases into the floor and that really uses momentum, weight transference and musicality. These things are strangely important. And that thing about obedient and disobedient bodies - in New Zealand it feels like the professional dance community has more space around it to make up the rules.

The abundance of dance performances to soak up has also been influential, with a shared highlight being athe Melbourne Festival performances by Anna Teresa De Keersmaker’s Company Rosas, and for Alys especially, twice-monthly improvisation performances through Cecil Street Studio.

For Alys and Vicky, living and dancing in Melbourne has offered the chance to be new to dance again, and with that, has come reconnection to the strengths of making dance in New Zealand. And you hang out for that moment, where a new concept clicks into place, and you belong to your movement differently, and the fresh ideas are like rain.

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