Denmark-based choreographer and creative producer Annette Carmichael has been short-listed, together with collaborator James Gentle, for a prestigious Australian Dance Award. Over a cup of tea, Nina Levy found out more about this multi-talented maker and manager.
Annette Carmichael. Photo: Jessica Wyld.
When Annette Carmichael moved from Perth down to the WA town of Denmark back in 2006, she didn’t imagine she’d find herself working as a choreographer. Although she trained in dance for many years, Carmichael was firmly established in her career as an arts manager (albeit one specialising in dance), and had worked with the likes of West Australian Ballet, STEPS Youth Dance Company, Buzz Dance Theatre, STRUT Dance and the Festival of Perth (now Perth Festival) in that capacity.
But fast forward to 2018 and Carmichael has been shortlisted for the competitive Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Community Dance, for her role as choreographer of The Beauty Index, alongside sound designer and collaborator James Gentle. Described as “daring and divine” by Seesaw critic Amy Wiseman, the contemporary dance work explores vulnerability, strength, terror and beauty, and was created on and performed by a cast of men from the Great Southern region of WA, most of whom had no formal dance training prior to the project. The Beauty Index was performed at Denmark’s Brave New Works Festival in November 2017.
So how did an arts manager find herself making as well as managing?
Carmichael was no stranger to community dance at a management level. As WA regional dance facilitator at Ausdance WA between 2009 and 2013 she founded and implemented the ground-breaking Future Landings project, a model that uses dance as a means of animating regional communities.
Her motivation for making her own community dance work, however, is artistic rather than altruistic she tells me, and hugely rewarding at that level. From her first project with Doquile and Lees, a piece for male dancers entitled MoveMENt, Carmichael was won over by the artistic satisfaction she found in making community contemporary dance works.
‘You can go incredibly complex with community dance.’ A page from Carmichael’s notebook showing the score for the Vigil, from ‘The Beauty Index’.
Currently Carmichael is working on a new work for 16-26 year olds, entitled A Light Shade of Red. It’s chapter II of “The Beauty Index” trilogy, Carmichael explains, with chapter III planned for 2020.
“A Light Shade of Red will go into the Albany Entertainment Centre in October,” she says. “It’s part of the lead up to centenary of Armistice Day. In 2014 I made a work called My War? and that was for the centenary of the flotilla departing from Albany. That laid some of ground work for A Light Shade of Red, which is about being in a liminal, transitional space. When we spoke to veterans, in consultation for My War?, they talked to us about this feeling when you’re about to come home that’s really complex. You’re so connected to your fellow soldiers, you’ve been keeping each other alive for months and then you go home, and it’s weird. You’re doing things like mowing the lawn, and trying to relate to people again. A Light Shade of Red is looking at being on brink of change, and that sensation of hope and anxiety.
A scene from Annette Carmichael’s Australian Dance Award nominated work, ‘The Beauty Index’. Photo: Nic Duncan.
While 2020 may seem a long way off, Carmichael has already begun thinking about the creative process, during a four week residency at Albany Entertainment Centre, funded by Country Arts WA, to make a quartet for local dancers Summer Addy, Holly Carter, Symnatha Parr and Tash Rolfe. “That quartet will probably seed the 2020 work,” she muses.
At a broader level, and with her arts manager hat on, Carmichael is thrilled by the growing demand that she sees for locally made performing arts, thanks to both her own project, Future Landings, and Circuit West (an arts membership organisation that exists to build connections between its members and stakeholders, to benefit WA audiences). “There is definitely an increase in appetite for contemporary dance and theatre works to be made regionally,” she concludes.
A Light Shade of Red premieres alongside a remount of The Beauty Index at Albany Enterainment Centre 19-20 October.
Pictured top: L-R Alex Pyke, Alexander Grace, Adrian Baer in ‘The Beauty Index’ by Annette Carmichael. Photo: Nic Duncan.