Platform Papers > Issue 08: Body for Hire?

Body for Hire:
The State of Dance in Australia

by Amanda Card

Read the first three pages (PDF).

Subscribe now!
Click here to download a subscription form.

Paperback. $13.95 rrp. Publication April 2006

ISBN 0-97573-013-4, Series ISSN 1449383-X

Once dancers joined ballet, modern dance groups or chorus lines and did what they were directed to do, writes Amanda Card. Today the art is more collaborative, at least in the contemporary dance field, but there are too many graduating students and little steady work, few auditions and decreasing opportunity for newcomers. The best dancers today are ‘bodies for hire’, those who are versatile, open-minded, independent and comfortable in every genre. Choreography has become a more democratic process in which dancers, choreographer and directors come to depend on each other. In her guide to the future of dance in Australia Amanda proposes the disbandment of failing dance company structures in favour of the free sharing of the talents of artists, members of a ‘super group’ under the management of creative producers or a new breed of artistic directors.

‘We need to reinvigorate dance in Australia—for the sake of excellence of the form, the health of our creative artists and for the attraction of audiences. We need a new system—an alternate way of employing choreographers and a new deal for dancers.’ 

AMANDA CARD spent her professional career as a dancer with Kinetic Energy, on the commercial dance circuit in Sydney, Japan and South-East Asia, and as a member of Human Veins Dance Theatre. In 1990 she traded dance for academic study and holds a PhD from the University of Sydney. She is executive producer of Onextra, lectures in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney and is Chair of Critical Path, Sydney’s choreographic research and development centre.

 This issue also includes responses to David Throsby.

Platform Papers invites considered responses to Amanda Card for publication in the July edition.