Dance is moving into the gallery. In the last six months across Sydney and Melbourne, we have seen choreographic works by Shelley Lasica at Monash University Museum of Art, Riana Head-Toussaint in the opening program of Sydney Modern, Lucy Guerin at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Alicia Frankovich at the Ian Potter Museum: NGV Australia, for Melbourne Now, Jo Lloyd at Carriageworks, and can currently see Victoria Hunt as part of Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. While these are just a few examples of dance in gallery or museum spaces, they speak to hugely diverse moments where choreography and dance are foundational to an artist’s vision.
Yet over time, dance at major institutions has been cultivated by smaller galleries and organisations such as West Space, Gertrude Contemporary and Neon Parc in Melbourne, and Artspace, Firstdraft and ALASKA Projects in Sydney, as well as multi-arts venues such as Phoenix Central Park, Performance Space/Carriageworks and Campbelltown Arts Centre. The 2009-2010 exhibition What I Think When I Think About Dancing at Campbelltown, curated by Emma Saunders and Lisa Havilah, was in step with international curatorial pre-occupations with dance in the early 2000s.
Each of these venues have their own communities of artists and creative contexts that inform how artists approach the dance-visual arts interface. As at Neon Parc, which centred dance and choreography, the opportunity allowed for curatorial experimentation; the artists “were encouraged to do what they want, present the work for as long as they want, engage as many performers as they want, and address the audience as they want”.
