Bec Dundas: a perfect fit

Bec Dundas is a mover and now she has made a move again … to Hobart, with her husband Samuel Dundas and young son Kit, to become Artistic Director of DRILL Performance. LESLEY GRAHAM finds out how she got there.

"There are a few times in your career where you see a perfect fit."

In the early 2000s, Bec Dundas (then Bec Jones) was in intense ballet training with Robbyn Garrett Doyle and Terry Simpson in Adelaide. Her interest in contemporary dance was tweaked with a workshop with Jo Lloyd and an excursion to see Chunky Move perform Tense Dave in Year 11/12 Dance. There was no youth dance company in Adelaide then, so through her exposure to Chunky Move she found a new world where she felt she would fit. "I wanted to roll on the floor, experiment with my body, test my limits and see where those capacities transform into theatre."

She undertook a Bachelor of Dance Performance at Adelaide College of the Arts (AC Arts) where she worked with many "really interesting" people including Jo Stone and Paulo Castro, who were theatre makers but also worked in dance, and choreographers Aidan Munn, Brooke Stamp, Adam Wheeler, Leigh Warren and Larissa McGowan. "I really value my training. I loved my time there and I had a really interesting group of people in my year that didn't come from the traditional ballet background and who went on to have amazing careers."

In third year, Dundas was given the opportunity to work with Leigh Warren [the Artistic Director of Leigh Warren and Dancers] and "he somehow saw something special in me, and what [would] fit with the fabric of his company and invited me to come and take class".

"I think when one director, when you're a young person, sees something special in you, it can really be a break into a performing career," she observes. There were two dance companies in Adelaide at the time, Leigh Warren and Dancers (LWD) and Australian Dance Theatre (ADT). "I was a really slight, small young person. There were these big muscly powerhouses in Garry Stewart's era of ADT, and they were throwing their bodies across the floor. I had the ballet training, and I was a gutsy pocket rocket, but I definitely didn't fit into the high octane fast throw your body around the floor of ADT."

Almost to career script, Dundas got her break with LWD when a seasoned artist who had been in the company for 20 years unfortunately dislocated her knee before a Holland Dance Festival tour. So, with her graduate showcase coming up in a few weeks, Dundas had three days to learn her role for two separate works (Impulse and Shimmer) and, with a fast-tracked passport, was standing in front of Jiri Kylian. For Dundas, "it was just like snowball of right place, right time."

Within a week of graduating, Warren called her and offered her a project in Adelaide Festival with one of his works and for Prue Lang, who’d just come back from working with William Forsythe in Germany. So began a six-year run with the company. "Travelling nationally and internationally with Leigh Warren was a bit of a dream."

It also gave her space to work on other projects, because LWD contracts, at that time, were between six to nine months long, with three key works happening each year. In between she could work with independent artists in SA and start to work out what her own voice might look like as a maker. During that time she took up a couple of contracts with Opera Australia in its Melbourne and Sydney seasons, which allowed her keep up her skills working with other ballet-trained dancers while providing her with an income to continue to work in mainstream contemporary dance.

It wasn’t until 2015, and once her time had wrapped up with LWD, that Dundas felt the need to move away from SA. When Dundas moved to Sydney she worked independently and also explored her own choreographic voice by making work for Austinmer Dance Theatre and Brent Street Studios.

Dundas was performing for Opera Australia (where she met her husband-to-be Sam during a season of Madama Butterfly), when she received a call from Annie Greig, the Artistic Director of Tasdance, offering her a short contract. The program was of works by Graeme Murphy and Stephanie Lake in collaboration with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. It would be Grieg’s final project with the company and felt like a special one to be a part of.

Sam had a gap in his projects, with three months break before another show in Sydney with Opera Australia. "So, we spent three months in Tassie together in late 2015 and we saw how special the island was and that you could have a career here."

Dundas was offered work with Tasdance again in 2016, in Felicity Bott’s era, so the couple decided to pack up all their stuff across different share houses in Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne and base themselves in Launceston.

"I felt like we were stuck in this rat race in Sydney of trying to survive and as independent artists we needed to take the pressure off and find somewhere. Sam was 32 when we met, I was nearly twenty-six.  We needed to make a home for ourselves. We felt like we were heading into that mid-career stage of life, and we could do that in Tasmania. So, life and art, life and career, in the perfect Venn diagram of the work you want to do or want to make and places you want to live, they aligned for a moment."

The couple have both taken all the opportunities that came in Tasmania, knowing there's no opera company here. Between contracts on the mainland, Sam has worked with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, performed with Ten Days on the Island festival and will be performing in a cabaret with IO Performance. “We've both been able to make a life here. We've also had our son here, so Tasmania feels like home now."

Then Dundas hit a point where she didn’t know where she was going. She wanted to work as a producer or similar, and in 2019 she couldn’t see many opportunities for her in the north of Tasmania. She took a job working in events management, marketing for a wine company for two years, and saw how things operated in a different industry.

"It was really valuable to learn skills and work in a big corporate company, gain a fresh perspective, and then take those skills and put them back into the arts."

After their child was born, Dundas worked as associate producer with Assembly 197 and as the acting artistic director of the youth company, Stompin, and discovered a passion for youth arts. When the artistic director role came up with DRILL Performance, in nipaluna Hobart, she felt confident to apply.

"There are few times in your career where you see a perfect fit. This is a role that suits me. I love that it's an opportunity to make work with young people and listen to their voices.

"We had a really well-established village and community in Launceston after eight years and it was a big gamble upheaving my family to come to Hobart, not knowing if the role was going to work out. You have to know when to take these opportunities, take that risk and see where it will lead. It's really paid off because we love living here and I’m really enjoying the role. We've been able to make new connections and create a new community. We don't have family on the island but after living here for about three or four months, Sam’s saying, ‘why didn't we do this sooner?’"

Dundas believes in it is important for young people to see that it's possible to balance family and arts practice.

"I want the young people at DRILL to know that when I'm in the space with them, I'm their artistic director and I'm there for them and I'm 100% present. But they also see me being a mother at the same time. I think it's important for them, if they've got ambitions to work in the arts, to see that they can also have a family and make a sustainable living from an arts career. Historically, I think women in arts leadership positions feel they have to choose between the two. I think that they're able to see me in a nurturing role to them because I'm a mother.”

This article was first published in the April/May/June print issue of Dance Australia. Subscribe and never miss a copy. Print is for keeps!