Dancing again

This morning, I attended a superb dance workshop with visiting American professor, Scott Putnam. I was too exhausted to stay for the afternoon session!

In fact, I must admit that I find contemporary dance heavy going - I only got through it at WAAPA by staying back to attend the evening classes for extra coaching, and I'm sure the examiners threw in a few charity marks so I at least got a pass in the exams.

It was lovely to watch all the keen young dancers (I was by far the oldest there!) and to see their inventive short choreographies. Professor Putnam is an excellent coach and I'm sure the dancers learned a great deal - as indeed I did, although whether or not I'll remember any of it this time next week is a moot point. The body feels worn out and I suspect the mind is heading in the same direction!

I was disappointed not to see more older teachers there. Perhaps Contemporary Dance is a young person's game. Classical ballet can also be exhausting, but at least you don't have to throw yourself onto the floor ten times a minute. (That's an exaggeration, but it does seem to be the default move when a contemporary dancer is wondering what to do next!)

As a young woman back in the late 1950s, I was deeply impressed by Contemporary Dance - it seemed so different from classical ballet, and so very modern. (Well, yes, Satima - that's why it's called Contemporary...) I first saw it when I attended a course of lectures by Beth Dean, an American dance ethnologist who had recently opened a school in Sydney. I was so impressed by this very new and different technique that I persuaded my mother to let me go to classes. It was an added expense for my parents - they were already paying for me to learn ballet at the Scully-Borovansky school, and piano, and singing, plus speech and drama, all at the Conservatorium.

But I enjoyed Miss Dean's classes, and started to take classical classes with her now and then. I eventually danced with her company, called Australian Dance Theatre. (It had no relationship to the later, Adelaide-based company of that name.) I am wont to boast about my appearance in a show before the Queen in 1963. I was dressed as  brolga, and while I'm sure the Queen wouldn't have noticed me as one of six people in brown all-overs with hoods, it was an experience to remember!

Dance has been my main love since I was four, when I saw the lovely pictures in a Ballet Annual owned by one of my sisters. However, I didn't start learning until I was eleven, and for the first year I had to pay for lessons out of my pocket money as my mother considered dancing to be a waste of time and money.

Then we moved house, and my new teacher, Joan Ashton, taught me free in return for helping with the junior classes. She even paid for me to have classes with her teacher, the late, great, Isobel Anderson. But young people don't always value or even see what people are doing for them, and I abandoned Miss Ashton and Miss Anderson to study at the more famous Scully-Borovansky school.

Somewhere about that time, I saw a performance by the Bodenwieser company at the Conservatorium. That means I must've seen the now centenarian Eileen Kramer!

Well, here I am sixty years later, loving dance as much as ever but unable to perform  many steps and exercises that at one time I would have done easily and with gusto. Tempus has fuggitted, and stolen just about all my flexibility and most of my strength as well! But I won't stop dancing until I become absolutely incapable of doing a plié!

Many thanks to Robyn Cooper and Angela Perry for their organisation of today's workshop. It was a joy to attend!