GERMANY: SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY PERFORM AT THE COLOGNE ARTS FESTIVAL

Record ID: 393515

  • Title: GERMANY: SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY PERFORM AT THE COLOGNE ARTS FESTIVAL
  • Date: 12th July 2002
  • Summary: SLATE INFORMATION
  • Embargoed: 27th July 2002 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: COLOGNE, GERMANY
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: Arts,General
  • Reuters ID: LVAEOMJJZY50XMXK1TRVIJL4RZ6B
  • Story Text: The Sydney Dance Company is Australia's most celebrated dance company and one of the country's most valuable artistic institutions. Grounded in the early 1970's it is widely credited with having changed the face of Australian dance under the guidance of its artistic director, the celebrated dancer and choreographer Graeme Murphy. Two years ago, the troupe entertained the world at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Australia and now they on tour for the first time in Germany with their show 'Free Radicals'; Reuters caught up with them recently at the Cologne's summer festival.
    As contemporary dance companies go, few have had to endure a harder struggle for survival than The Sydney Dance Company. But in 1976, The Dance Company Of New South Wales as it was then known, invited Australian choreographer Graeme Murphy to be its artistic director and its fortunes changed.
    Now the company, which is based in Sydney's famous opera house, is one of the countries artistic jewels and Australian dance has never looked back, but as Brett Morgan points out, it hasn't been an easy ride.
    "In Australia, to have a company going for twenty six to thirty years is very unusual, especially when it is a choreograph company and Graeme Murphy has done an extreme amount of full length works as well as one act ballets, and after twenty six years to still be going strong is quite a testament especially in our country, because we don't have the sort of funding or sort of Government support that companies over here in Europe do have".
    Part of the company's success lies in the fact that it is able to pick from the cream of the Australian dance scene; with a troupe of only seventeen ballet trained dancers, there are always dancers who are lining up to join the company. The rewards for the dancers are that, besides dancing for the country's premier dance company, they get the chance for individual expression as Brett Morgan points out.
    "So for us rather than having like a big company where there is a group, each single person is a soloist in the own right and so that is the key I think to our success which makes us different and Graeme has a unique ability to be able to tap into that".
    The company's show 'Free Radicals' is on tour for the first time in Germany and puts together elements of contemporary dance with percussion instruments, some of which were hand made in Tasmania for the show. Free Radicals was something of a departure for the company as Michael Askill explains, because the dance movements were written before the music.
    "Free Radicals in fact has no story or no narrative line running through it. It is really just a coming together of dancers and musicians and in the beginning, when we put the show together, there was in fact no music already in mind, in anyone's mind for the show, so we put the music together very slowly with the choreography and brought in the instruments gradually as we needed them and part of the brief for the show was that we keep it as light and portable as possible so all the instruments are very small, there is nothing too heavy or large or complicated".
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