Lady Example

The biennial Dance Massive will be held at the Arts Centre this year, showcasing 15 contemporary dance companies and choreographers from across Australia.

Lady Example – created and performed by Alice Dixon, William McBride and Caroline Meaden (a.k.a. Alice Will Caroline) – is a combination of contemporary dance and theatre that considers the historical and contemporary feminine, exploring the lady examples of years past and the lady examples still in progress.

The group have created five original, full-length works over the course of four years together, winning the 2015 Fringe Award for Best Dance, the Arts House Evolution Award in 2016 and the nomination for Australian Dance and Green Room Awards in 2016, and a 2017 Australian Dance Award.

The non-hierarchical trio describes Lady Example as “a dance of bodies, words and women”. The dance explores the lady examples we have encountered on our stages, our screens and in the performance of our everyday life. The group uses a libretto – the text used in an opera or other long vocal work – mashed up from numerous sources collected over the last four years, resulting in a denatured language that is present in their 75-minute performance.

The trio employ humour to help explore the more confronting themes present in their artwork, and they choose to undertake a “problematised engagement” with unpleasant or difficult parts of their work. Doing so allows them to accept the parts of themselves, their culture, shared and individual histories that might be troublesome.

Lady Example
Dance Massive 2019
dancemassive.com.au