Meet up and gather youth dance festival
Meet Up is a biennial festival for Australian youth dance companies produced by QL2 Dance and Youth Dance Australia, held in Canberra in the off-year of the Australian Youth Dance Festival.
After being postponed during Covid, Meet Up returned in July with six of Australia's premiere youth dance companies, 70 young dance artists and 20 leaders, supported by local independent artists, meeting over four days to connect, discuss, share, create and perform.
Meet Up 2023 was timed to draw stimulation and energy from concurrent Canberra activities, including Uncharted Territory Innovation Festival, Poetry City Festival and NAIDOC Week. The event culminated in "Gather", showcasing the six participating companies' innovative works, presented at the Canberra Theatre Centre Playhouse, and offering audiences a taste of the next generation of Australian creators.
Following a gracious acknowledgement of country by Indigenous artist/dancer Sarah Bolt, the "Gather" program opened with Connection, a contemporary Aboriginal duo by Indigenous QL2 dancers Jahna Lugnan (Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr) and Julia Villaflor (Waigman). This flowing "Welcome to Dance" melded the strength and intent of traditional indigenous dance with balletic and contemporary movement, underscoring the cross-cultural connections of dance expressed by Bolt when she acknowledged herself to be both a Bundjalung woman and “a Lismore girl”.
The "Gather" program then unfolded the artistry, professionalism and courage of our young performers and choreographers in embracing the adaptability of contemporary dance styles and genres to entertain while taking on contemporary issues and social trends.
AUSTI Dance and Physical Theatre's Move Me, choreographed by Timothy Farrar and dancers, took on the increasingly topical and fraught issue of moving between living spaces. The Illawarra Coast company sourced movement from packing, moving, reorganising and negotiating space, featuring strong technique and a shifting, cooperative unison, which navigated both the mechanical and social aspects of relocation.
Untethered, presented by Launceston's youth company Stompin, was the product of a short development period by Artistic Director Caitlin Comerford and her dancers. This work featured lighter-than-air balloons, tied to wrists, floating above each performer and curiously anchoring their movement to the antithetical "weight" of their buoyancy. The primacy given to the objects as analogues of the thoughts, joys and memories to which we tie ourselves and somehow need to untether from, restricted the performers' range of movement – until the dancers were released from the balloons and empowered to move more freely. This already strong investigation of an object as site/place certainly has development potential.
Tagged as "Glorious Metallic Joy", Fling presented Gabrielle Rose and dancers’ energetic, entertaining Puffer. This company, based in Bega, NSW, featured eight dancers clad in three-quarter-length hooded puffer jackets lit by stark tangential lighting, bouncing off the metallic silver fabric and shadowing hooded faces. The effect was of an anonymous puffer-puppetry, emphasised by strong unison. Then, smashing the animated feel, the dancers shucked the jackets and revealed themselves in an exuberant finale.
Host company QL2 performed Shared Language, from choreographers Ruth Osborne, Steve Gow and dancers, focused on the selfie-self-centred world of the small screen and examining the divergence in the digital world between communication and connection, knowledge and understanding. This tightly structured work demanded discipline and attention to quality of movement from the artists.
Catapult's youth initiative Flipside Project from Newcastle switched to personal perspectives on the cross currents around evolving gender constructs with Conversations from the other day, a collaboration with choreographer Alexandra Ford. The conversations are embodied in a technical, lower intensity choreography, combining gesture and movement to express the emerging spaces where the macro and micro shifts in expectations are experienced against the dominant cultural backdrop.
Remixed disco and excerpts from Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol intone across Kyall Shanks and Yellow Wheel's collaboration on The Dancing Fever of 1518, a flamboyant celebration of sombre disco diversity. This Melbourne company's mini-extravaganza had 17 dancers, character roles, multiple costume changes and flashes of 80s/90s pop references. It pushed the dancers' technique and endurance and had the audience tapping their toes, while somehow making sense of the juxtaposition of dour poetry and disco to highlight tolerance of social difference.
These engaging works, the scope of their subjects and the quality of their presentation allowed the arc of the program of "Gather" to make meaning beyond the intent of each work.
"Gather" demonstrated that youth dance companies and young dancers make a strong contribution to Australia's dance landscape. A quick survey of national and international companies which now feature graduates from these six institutions will show that many of our leading dancers, choreographers, designers and technicians started their careers in youth dance.
That these companies produce such strong and diverse work and nurture such talent on meagre funding is to be both applauded and lamented as dance is Australia could benefit even more if they were adequately funded to further develop as incubators of the artists and technicians who are vital to the growth and ongoing success of the industry.
– ANTHONY PLEVEY