ON VIEW: ICONS

Dance, quintessentially ephemeral, has no shared archive or collective notation, unlike literature, music and visual art, to ensure that knowledge is not lost.  

We, as audiences, also have very short memories. Together we haven’t seen the same dances, haven’t witnessed the unfolding links between choreographic works. Hence, it is difficult to map lineages and connect the dots across the vast landscape of dance.  

I translate dance to the screen as an antidote to this impermanence; as a means to prevent the loss of knowledge, as well as offering new dimensions to how it is viewed and perceived. 

The ON VIEW series is a decade-long exploration into the essence of portraiture and a celebration of extraordinary lives led through the artform of dance. 

The ON VIEW project began in 2014, with a series of digital cine-portraits featuring Australian dance artists Martin del Amo, Shona Erskine, Benjamin Hancock, Raghav Handa and Nalina Wait. These portraits evolved into performance installations showcased across Australia and Asia. ON VIEW: PANORAMIC SUITE, the major work of this series, toured Japan and Hong Kong, overcoming the challenges posed by the global pandemic. Comprising 29 portraits, this collection presents an array of single-channel films, multi-screen installations and live performance, offering the viewer the opportunity to experience the vast geographic, temporal and formal landscapes of the featured performers. 

A special component of the ten-year series, ON VIEW: ICONS reveals six Australian dance luminaries. These artists are the pioneers, the leaders, the thinkers, who have lived their lives completely through dance and inspired countless generations of dancers. The project blurs distinctions between art, documentary, biography and performance to reach for that elusive essence of each artist. It has been an honour and deep privilege to have collaborated closely with these remarkable women. Eileen, Lucette and Shirley have recently left us, but through these portraits, I aim to capture not only the physical presence and profound practices of all six dancers, but also their enduring legacies. 

Meditations in Presence – Essay by Dr Nalina Wait
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