Artist profile: Miranda Wheen

 

Being a dancer can be a multi-faceted adventure, widening horizons both physically and and mentally. For Miranda Wheen, her dancing took her somewhere she had never imagined as a young dancer growing up in western Sydney: to West Africa and the L’ecole des Sable in Senegal.

This famous school is led by the woman known as the “mother of contemporary dance” in Africa, Germain Acogny. Wheen applied on a whim, found the money thanks to a generous relative, was plunged into a range of classes, and came away from the experience profoundly moved. “It fundamentally changed the way I think about dance,” she says now.

The trip to Africa came about because at the time she was dancing with Elizabeth Cameron Dalman and her Canberra-based company, Mirramu. Dalman, the founder of Australian Dance Theatre, had been invited by Acogny to be on the faculty of the workshop. Wheen went out of a desire to expose herself to something completely new, “to learn something like a child again”. “When I arrived I was totally hopeless,” she laughs, “it was really like being a baby, dealing with all the rhythms and all the classes, dancing outside on the sand, with 10 to 15 live drummers for every class, just like a totally new environment, a style of dance that was loud and big and sweaty.”

That was in 2007, a long time ago now, but it directly paved the way for many of the collaborations that have shaped her career since then, and particularly with Marreguku, which, on seeing her experience in Senegal, selected her as the only non-indigenous participant in its Indigenous Choreographic Laboratories.

Marrugeku, led by the highly respected pair Dalisa Pigram and Rachel Swain, is a landmark company in Australia,  dedicated to bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists both here and overseas and introducing audiences to indigenous knowledge systems and history through intercultural collaborations and performances.

Marrugeku was probably also impressed by Wheen's experience working with Dalman on a project in a local community in the Central Desert up in Arnhem Land, showing she "had an interest and experience in culturally diverse contexts,” she explains.

Wheen has now been associated with the company for about a decade, and has appeared in Cut The Sky; Le Dernier Appel (The Last Cry), Marrugeku's collaboration with artists from New Caledonia; and Burrbgaja Yalirra 1 (Dancing Forwards) a triple bill of Marrugeku's associate artists. She is one of the core collaborators on its celebrated work, Jurrungu Ngan-ga [Straight Talk], which has continued to tour Australia to critical acclaim since its premiere in 2021. Her part, representing the perspective of her “white settler” heritage, is not an easy one, “but all the nine performers bring their own perspective to Australia’s sometimes dark history,” she says.

Wheen is a founding director of the Dance Makers Collective, based in Western Sydney, a group of nine artists committed to supporting independent dance. From its beginnings in 2012, this enterprising group (which proudly describes itself as Australia’s “only collective-led professional dance company”), has not just survived but thrived, and has an impressive program of activities open to the dance community, from classes to choreographic development to creating and holding its own public performances. Among the activities, for example, is a resident company program, offering financial and administrative support to applicants (https://dancemakerscollective.com.au/programs/resident-company/and and Work in Progress Performance Nights, an opportunity for independent artists to test a new work in front of a sympathetic audience.

 Operating out of premises in Seven Hills, DMC has just secured multi-year funding from Creative Australia (beginning next year). (It already had multi-year state funding, so it seems the funding authorities like what they are seeing.) As the only NSW small to medium dance company to receive multi-year funding in that round, the group is not taking its luck for granted. “We really feel that responsibility to the dance sector, to support it and do good work and also to spread that support beyond just us.”

Wheen is presently turning her focus to the creation of a new large scale work, involving the nine DMC members as the core cast as well as other community groups and up to 20 members of Future Makers, DMC’s emerging artists ensemble.

In the meantime, she is performing in a season of Jurrungu Ngan-ga [Straight Talk] at the llawarra Performing Arts Centre from 29-31 August.

- KAREN VAN ULZEN