Anouk van Dijk’s memory of the first “real” dancer she saw still moves her tears. The newly appointed artistic director of Chunky Move is now a very cosmopolitan woman in her mid-40s whose career has spanned many countries. Nonetheless, she vividly recounts her experience, when she was 15 years old, of “Ivan” dancing, in a small room that “smelt like amateur dance”. “I didn’t know a person could fill the room with so much energy,” she says now. “That was the turning point for me.”
Dijk was in Melbourne in January 2012 to audition for dancers. She then returned to her homeland of Holland, and came back to Melbourne to take up the reins proper in June 2012. She told the story of “Ivan” at a press luncheon at the Sofitel and was momentarily overcome at the memory, despite the assembled media. Nothing could have told more strongly of her passion for her artform.
She went on to tell us of another turning point for her when she was aged 22, watching a performance of a work by Dutch choreographer, Hans van Manen. “One of the dancers fell flat on her bum. She was in shock. In the moment of her getting up off the floor I saw all her different thought processes, in a split second. It made me realise there is all this stuff in people that we don’t see.” Dijk found she was more interested in seeing the dancer “lose and then regain control” than in the rest of the choreographed dance. This led her to her present choreographic goal, of “wanting to find dance that expresses everything we are as a person.”
Dijk trained at the Rotterdam Dance Academy, graduating in 1985, and performed with several groups in the Netherlands and abroad such as Werkcentrum Dans, the Nieuwe Dansgroep, the Rotterdamse Dansgroep and Amanda Miller's Pretty Ugly Dance Company. In 1998 she founded her own company, anoukvandijk dc, which presently has links with the prestigious Shaubuehne in Berlin. According to her website, she has choreographed more than 25 works. In 2000 she was awarded the Lucas Hoving Prize during the festival Dutch Dance Days. She has also developed a method of training, called Countertechnique, which “discards the dominant opinion in the dance world that all movement relates to one centre in the body”, and which she teaches all over the world. (For a full description see www.anoukvandijk.nl).
Dijk first encountered Chunky Move at the American Dance Festival in 2005. The company performed Tense Dave, and she found it “delightful, refined, detailed, daring, funny, tragic, moving”. Later in a separate interview she added: “It was so much more intellectually interesting than the most of the other work there.”
She already knew Gideon Obarzanek, the founding director of Chunky Move, from the time he was in Holland to create a work for NDT 2, where he took her classes and then invited her to teach the NDT group. “He said, ‘they’ve only had classical – you know how to make them move’.”
When she heard that Chunky Move was looking for an artistic director, she was intrigued. “I felt my work would thrive really well here”, given her admiration for the company’s philosophy. Choreographically, she likes to experiment with the impact of the “unknown” and how environment affects a work, so a shift to somewhere as distant as Australia made an exciting challenge.
At the time of writing, Dijk had just completed four days’ worth of auditions. About 300 dancers applied, of which she chose 130 to take the audition. This she had narrowed down to a final fifteen. The aspiring dancers had to perform movement from an existing work, simple tasks using voice and microphone, a one minute solo of their choice, improvisation, and an assignment phrase. She was looking for such things as the dancers’ ability to collaborate, how physically extreme they could be, mathematical skills (for composition), stamina, their sense of humour. She also asked each dancer to bring in two sets of different clothing, one that brought out their feminine and one that brought out their masculine side, “to see what different qualities come out”.
She was impressed by what she saw. “They were really good,” she said with feeling. “You have so many good dancers here!”
Watch Dijk taking a countertechnique class below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ1_jQq8M1o.
-- KAREN VAN ULZEN