“We have retrieved a lot of necessary ground but nobody wants to know about that”

Leigh Warren, Artistic Director of Australian Dance Theatre
interviewed by Murray Bramwell

FUNDING cuts continue to loom for most performing companies in much the same way that Birnam Wood moved on Dunsinane, although, at the moment it seems to be the dance companies who are particularly vulnerable. Recently, Sydney’s Once Extra Company lost funds altogether while elsewhere, artistic differences are resulting in resignations and uncertainty. Nanette Hassall has just left Danceworks, announcing that she is going to work overseas where she is already welcome and well-known. And in Adelaide the Australian Dance Theatre has continued to have a testing time as far as its policy and repertoire are concerned.

As recently as January this year Dance Australia has been publishing snippets hinting that all is not well in the ADT tents and that the company is having major attendance and repertoire problems. One subscriber, who describes himself as “a friend and keen supporter since Wildstars” (ADT’s now almost mythical pop production from 1980), has led a niggling campaign against the company’s recent work. One can only observe that with friends like this, ADT won’t need a nemesis.

The subscriber, whose allegiances appear to belong to those associated with Jonathan Taylor before his resignation in 1986, has vigorously opposed the suitability of ADTs Artistic Director, Leigh Warren and questioned the direction the company has taken under his leadership. It has been a relentless business, a veritable paper war with forty page documents landing on the desks of Premiers and arts editors alike.

While much of the debate has been needlessly acrimonious and merits no further attention here, the subscriber has, perhaps unwittingly, raised central questions about ADTs brief and its obligations as a recipient of considerable state support. To what extent can that support be considered patronage necessary to establish a talent base in South Australia, and how much is it a capital investment with an expectation of a return? The answer, of course, is that it is both. But getting the mix sorted out has been of concern for those at ADT – not least for the sometimes beleaguered Leigh Warren.

Leigh Warren took over ADT just two years ago after a distinguished career with the Australian Ballet, Ballet Rambert and Nederlands Dans Theatre. With such credentials as the latter, it is hardly surprising that his commitment is to contemporary dance and not the classical and neo-classical repertoire. Warren took over a company in turmoil after the influential Jonathan Taylor’s resignation. Many loyalties were vexed about the circumstances of Taylor’s departure and, whoever his successor was going to be, he or she was likely to face some flak, although Leigh Warren reports that the Board, the key technical and administrative people, as well as the company’s dancers, were very much on side.

In conversation, Leigh Warren describes the activities of the company over the past two years. He is clear and courteous but also just a little weary from it all: “I had to clean up a huge mess at the beginning of 1987. In two years I have created a repertoire which is not a copy of anything. I’ve got rid of a deficit in a situation where I have not received any additional funding or support other than that from the State Department of the Arts, who, by the way, have been fantastic for giving us breathing space. We have retrieved a lot of necessary ground but nobody wants to know about that.”

Warren is particularly emphatic that to build a dance company takes time. Success is not an overnight sensation and it depends on rapport between players. He cites his own experience to illustrate:

“With Ballet Rambert and Nederlands, I’ve been in two creative waves where there was a collection of very creative people which a choreographer needs if he or she is going to create work of any depth. Now, in the case of Jiri Kylian at Nederlands, only by the end of four years had we finally made it. Only then was he producing really good stuff – and with his previous company they worked for seven years.

“Here I am entering my third year with the same group. The continuity is paramount. It is really hard to keep dancers because they are gypsies. But the reason they are staying is that they can feel the creativity happening.

“We are now at the point when the company can begin to tour. Once that happens we are talking about survival and the bums-on-seats subsidy going right down. We’ve got the necessary ingredients; we’ve got the people and the finances organised and we have built a new repertoire which is completely
original and that is strategically important.”

Warren is adamant that, with choreographers like Nanette Hassall and Graeme Watson, ADT has worked with the best in the country. Hassall’s work is familiar in the U.S. and Europe and Watson has just returned from a stint with Nederlands Dance. They have also, in Warren’s view, provided the ADT dancers with a necessary variety and range which makes them versatile. Many companies who tour here with great success would be considered monotonously down one track if they were based here, he suggests – which is why it is necessary for his company to tour and take advantage of the supports other states have to offer visitors. There is a northern tour of Queensland and Northern Territory already planned and one to W.A. in the offing. ADT will take the repertory program which it developed particularly during 1988.

Touring provides necessary opportunities to refine work, as Warren observes:

“Take the two companies who toured here recently – Emile Dubois Group and La La La – audiences were seeing pieces that had been performed many times. La La La were moving up to their hundredth performance of that piece – no wonder they were bloody marvellous.

“The attitude to local companies is – ‘Oh, we’ve seen that, we don’t want to see that again.’ Dancers need a hundred performances to progress in a work, to find that spirit. Kylian wouldn’t let us take a work overseas unless we’d danced it over forty times. That is four seasons of the same piece here in Adelaide. It takes so long to get those things together which make a work perfect. That is why Giselle is so marvellous – because it has had thousands of performances. People say, ‘Oh but it’s classic.’ It’s a classic because it has had thousands of performances.

“We are so disposable in our attitude towards dance projects. We need to have the repetition for the dancers to grow, to learn they can risk more and so on. At the end of ten performances you are still doing steps, at the end of forty performances it becomes dancing.”

Warren has always made it clear that he is not interested in presenting a classical repertoire. He is respectful of it, after all, he trained and excelled in it, but he sees it as part of a heritage that it is the task of the Australian Ballet, not ADT, to preserve. Nor is he particularly keen to emulate the commercialism of La La La which he compares to TV:

“When we go to the theatre we know Romeo and Juliet are not real but we go with the situation and begin to feel remorse, guilt, sadness, all these things. You know it’s not real but you feel all these emotions in yourself. Whereas TV is the reverse. You see realism but you don’t often have a reaction. With La La La you’d been stimulated but not moved. I loved their energy but they made no sense at all. Emile Dubois on the other hand, required that we search ourselves. The depth and the trust levels between him and his dancers are extraordinary.”

All of this raises questions of the commercial possibility of work such as that of ADT. Sources in the Department of the Arts are the first to acknowledge that dance is expensive to maintain but it is an all-or-nothing deal. It costs to develop repertoire, rehearse and tour and when a company offers progressive and unfamiliar work, audiences, particularly those in Adelaide, may not be all that appreciative. While he is as keen as anyone for the company to have a popular following locally, Warren recalls that the Nederlands Dans Theatre were least appreciated in their home town in The Hague.

He also recognises the contradictions in requiring a company to play to full houses. “What you are saying is that I need to be commercial, but if I’m being commercial I should do Cats and then I wouldn’t need funding at all. The whole premise of funding is the recognition that it is not commercially viable.”

The 1990 Adelaide Festival will be of particular significance for ADT. Leigh Warren has been putting together a trilogy which will premiere at a time when he believes local audiences are more receptive to new work. He is particularly determined that it be Australian work as well.

“When David White of the Dance Theatre Workshop in New York saw The Descent into the Maelstrom in 1986 he pointed out that the music was Philip Glass, the choreography Melissa Fenley, direction by Matthew Maguire- all Americans, and while the dancers were great, he wanted to see something Australian.

“Well that’s what he will be seeing in 1990. Australian choreography, designs and dancers. We couldn’t have taken our repertoire overseas before because it was pseudo Rambert and Nederlands. Now, they are importing our repertoire. Graeme Watson’s work from our program is being done by Nederlands in Europe. We can go abroad totally in our own right, that’s something we should be very proud of. That’s what we should be shouting from the Festival Centre rooftop.”‘

“Breakthrough ?” Lowdown, Vol.11, No.2, April, 1989, pp.33-36.