Dance pioneers celebrated in film

For this year's Dance (Lens) Mini series, Melbourne's Dancehouse is presenting award-winning choreographer and filmmaker Sue Healey’s On View: Icons.

Featured are six are some of Australia’s pioneering women in dance: Lucette Aldous AC, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman OAM, Nanette Hassall AM, Eileen Kramer, Elma Kris and Shirley McKechnie AO.

One of those featured, Eileen Kramer, died just last Friday (November 15), noted not just as a dancer (she was in the Bodenwieser company) but also thought to be the oldest person in NSW at 110 years old. This coincidence demonstrates just how precious such film recordings are.

On View: Icons is presented as a 3-channel video installation with a 1 hour duration. The installation will loop, beginning on the hour every hour, in the Sylvia Staehli Theatre at Dancehouse during the screening times.

Audiences may come and go as they please.

"Dance is quintessentially ephemeral," Sue Healey says, "– there is no shared archive or collective notation, to ensure ideas are not forgotten. The unique embodied languages of dance are passed on only by expert human care and attention to detail. This is easily lost. I translate dance to the screen as an antidote to its impermanence. An evolving archive, "On View: Icons" is a collection of portraits of iconic dance artists, whose legacies deserve to be remembered.

On View: Icons will run from November 28 to 30. For more information go here.