“Lady Example is a bewildering bricolage of behaviours and performances, knitted together with total assurance. You feel that it ought to crumble beneath the weight of its own spiralling aspirations. Instead, I found myself enthralled by a precision of judgement and execution that draws together this unclassifiable work into a fascinating unity.”
— Alison Croggon, Witness Performance
CREATIVE TEAM
Choreographers and Creators: Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden, William McBride
Performers: Alice Dixon, Ben Hurley, Fleur Conlon, Joanne White, Hannah Monson, Luke Fryer, Patrick Durnan-Silva, Caroline Meaden, William McBride, Emma Riches, Scott Elstermann
Lighting Designer: Jason Crick (2018), Jen Hector (2019)
Set and Costume Designer: Matilda Woodroofe
Sound Designer: Emah Fox
Producer: Erin Miln
DOCUMENTATION
Video: Takeshi Kondo (2019)
Photography: Bryony Jackson (2019)
Video and Photography: Mischa Baka (2018)
Nominated for four Green Room Awards - Best Ensemble (Dance), Best Production, Sound Composition, Best Performer
"...a phenomenal show that works even though, by all means, it should collapse under its own towering ambitions."
- Jana Perkovic, The Age
Lady Example
An intentionally undefined, expansive horde of stimulus is ground down, knitted into a fine weave, over a slow process guided strongly by our intuition and our personal baggage. We offer up a semiotic field for our audiences to wander through, undertaking your own journeys of recognition and confusion, completing the work with your own subconscious.
We describe Lady Example as “a dance of bodies, words and women.” We choreograph the moving, interacting body, as well as language, theatre, reference and design. From within the broad theme of “women,” we found patterns emerging around performativity, role playing, teaching and learning, inherited behaviour and expectations. Our “libretto” is drawn from a bank of miscellaneous language artefacts, gathered over four years, then mashed up and merged with the dance. The resulting “denatured language” (Alison Croggon) toys with recognition, and what to make of it is ultimately up to you (personal responsibility, honey).
As Alice Will Caroline we are three people working in harmonious and disharmonious collaboration. The negotiation is intrinsic to our work, and aligns with a feminism that challenges assumptions about hierarchy and authority in favour of “multiplicity and complexity” (Tere O’Connor). As an ensemble, each performer’s role was created in collaboration with them, and is inseparable from them.
To deal with negative or ambivalent emotion in our work, we often dive into things that are somehow off-putting, repellent, superficial or conventional. Instead of responding to unpleasant or difficult things with denial or rejection, we opt for prickly, slippery engagement. In this, we avoid rejecting the parts of ourselves and our shared histories that might be unpleasant. At its best, this can be an alchemical process, and a therapeutic acknowledgement of what exists, and of potential, within us and between us all.
We also freely embrace those things that spark
PERFORMANCE HISTORY
Presented by the Substation and Next Wave for Next Wave Festival, 2018
Presented by Arts House for DANCEMASSIVE, 2019
Thank You and Acknowledgements
Lady Example’s creation was made possible with support from The Substation, Next Wave, Arts House, Besen Family Foundation, Creative Victoria, Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Partnerships Australia, The City of Melbourne, The City of Maribyrnong, Vitalstatix and many private donors.
Thank you to Ross Dixon, Margaret O’Donohue, Paul Cavezza, Mark Wilson, Sherwyn Spencer, Ben Hurley, Jason Crick, Brad Spolding, Bron Belcher, Tim Meaden, Angela Meaden, Luke Fryer and Pia Lauritz.
