“This was a city within a city, a dot on the Melbourne landscape that would forever inform the way I viewed my new home.”
Anouk van Dijk was appointed Artistic Director of Chunky Move in 2012, here we take a look at some writing from her first moments in Melbourne.
Reflection written by Anouk van Dijk for Melbourne Now limited edition book by NGV in 2013.
My first work as the new Director of contemporary dance company Chunky Move, An Act of Now, was an outdoor, site-specific production that premiered at the 2012 Melbourne Festival. It was performed in October, and although I was new to the city I’d been here long enough to know that rain was to be expected – this was Melbourne, after all.
The challenge was to find a large, monumental outdoor site somewhere in inner-city Melbourne where the audience could take shelter if the weather turned. Brett Sheehy, then Artistic Director of Melbourne Festival, suggested investigating the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. When visiting the Bowl, I immediately saw the potential of transforming the audience’s relationship with this site, familiar to all Melbournians, into something completely different.
Standing on top of the hill, overlooking the city, I imagined what the original architects would have seen: the skyline of Melbourne, the grassy hills towards the river and the spot where they’d eventually decide to build the Bowl, perfectly balanced within the built natural environments. On the top of that hill is where An Act of Now began, in a Melbourne moment shared by the audience and me. First, the revelation of the CBD skyline – a glowing hue of neon advertising signs and then – the sloping hills ensconcing the Bowl, stark and draped in the shadow of the night sky.
A sudden flash lit the inside of the Bowl, unveiling a tiny smoke-filled greenhouse – a fragile speck in the distance dwarfed by the enormity of the stage it was housed on. The audience descend the hill, seating themselves on that iconic stage traditionally home to rock concerts and Carols by Candlelight. Inside the greenhouse eight dancers performed as a microcosm of humanity: the individual, the group, the tortured, the serene.
The audience observed this, at times as voyeurs and at times as though they were inside the greenhouse, breathing the same air and sharing the same experience with the dancers. This was a city within a city, a dot on the Melbourne landscape that would forever inform the way I viewed my new home.
- Anouk van Dijk
Photo by Hamish Lane. Front cover photo by Szilvia Sztankovits.
As Chunky Move's new leader slides into her role she is aware of how space and place have left their mark on her dancers.
By Philippa Hawker, February 3, 2012
Link to the article which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, here.
It was a great way to begin, says Anouk van Dijk of the first days she spent as artistic director at the contemporary dance company Chunky Move. She has just held four days of workshops and auditions, and they were the perfect introduction, ''a way of opening the door and saying, let's meet on the dance floor''.
There has been much interest in the direction the company will take with a new figure at the helm. Melbourne-based Chunky Move was founded by Gideon Obarzanek in 1995, and quickly established itself as an innovative force, nationally and internationally. Its new artistic director comes from the Netherlands, where she danced, choreographed and established her own company.
Van Dijk will not take over full-time until July, however. The auditions were a way to get started and to find performers for the first work she will create for the company. Three hundred applied, she invited 130. ''On the last day I had 22 left, with whom I could start tomorrow, wonderful people.''
She says the transition from one artistic director to the next will be ''organic, rather than a hard break''. The first half of 2012 is, in a way, ''still Gideon's''. He is currently choreographing a work for the Australian Ballet, but as far as Chunky Move is concerned, ''he will take care of things that are already established. I will be involved with new decisions and development.''
The company's production of Connected is touring the US in the first half of this year, while van Dijk has a commitment to fulfil - a piece she is doing in Dusseldorf with playwright and director Falk Richter. She returns to Melbourne in June.
She is full of enthusiasm for the possibilities she already sees, among dancers, in the culture, and in a different kind of space and place, ''closer to Asia, on the edge of the desert, the bush''. She is also looking forward to ''being in a city with a culture of food''. In the meantime, preparations are in train for the new piece. In the next few weeks she will select six to eight dancers and firm up the location for what will be a site-specific work. She is looking for place that will hold a maximum of 300 people, and ''will allow the audience to feel exposed and sheltered at the same time''.
And she needs dancers ''who are willing to go to extremes with what they can do with their bodies, and their communication with each other''. At the auditions, she was struck by the cultural diversity of the dancers and the range and the talent she saw. ''It was really inspiring.''
Van Dijk says being appointed to Chunky Move is a special opportunity. ''International recruitment is rare in the contemporary dance world.''
She has been aware of the company since 2005 and she knew Obarzanek from early days, when he came to choreograph a work for the Nederlands Dans Theater, and invited her to teach the dancers. She says she feels a sense of trust from the organisation. ''And Gideon has said to me, 'Here it is, you do with it what you think is good'.''
She appreciates its indisciplinary interests, the way it has ranged from ''community-based to high-art'' projects. She believes there are some things that she and Obarzanek share, above all ''a fascination with how other influences inform what dance is and can be and how it will be perceived. He has been working for quite a few years on the technology side of that and I've had more of an interest in the societal side.''
One thing she brings to the company, she says, is ''interest in the identity and the physicality of the performer''. Over the years, she has developed an approach known as counter-technique. ''It is not a dogmatic practice,'' she says. ''It is a philosophy about how you relate to your body and how you can work with it without going completely crazy.'' It is not a movement style - it's more helpful to think of it as ''a toolbox, something that can begin with simple devices and develop into much greater complexity''.
She is committed to what Chunky Move has embodied, including its curatorial and fostering role. And, she says, Chunky Move ''has been a place where information can come in and go out, almost like a portal. Things can come into Melbourne, into Australia, and the other way around. Already, people from my side of the world have been saying to me, 'Are you going to bring Australian artists here?' They are very curious about what people are doing. So I hope Chunky Move can have that kind of role too.''
