You also work in the area of community engagement – what we would call community arts – as well as choreography and teaching. Why so many strings to the bow?
If you live in Western Australia and you want to make a living as an independent dancer, then you have to work in as many areas as possible. I think in Melbourne it might be possible to work full-time as an independent dancer and even there it is a tiny number of people who can actually do it.
The advice I got when I moved back to Perth to start working with the Co3 Contemporary Dance Company was, “diversify or die”. It is very rare you can get a long contract to dance, unless you work for a full time company, and we only have 3 full time companies in Australia.
The other side of that is that if you go full time into teaching, you make it hard for yourself to do creative work. If you are teaching full time, it is unlikely you will be able to get the time off from the dance school to go and work on a 3-month creative project. So, my career has been a patchwork of casual and part time roles as a dance teacher and other arts adjacent jobs to allow me to have the availability to take contracts in community engagement and company roles as they come up. It really is quite difficult to maintain a career in the arts in Australia.
How has teaching worked out?
When I first graduated, I was offered some wonderful opportunities to do community work through Ausdance WA. For example I was mentored by Alice Lee Holland who was running the youth dance company in Perth at that point in time.
I received several opportunities to work in regional towns because I understood the experience of living in regionally. I found it particularly rewarding to, especially if the kids I was working with felt like they didn’t quite fit in and so they look for refuge in the arts. I didn’t have to work hard to understand the lives that those young people were experiencing as I had the same feelings when I grew up.
Your own work looks like it is multi-disciplinary. Is that accurate to say?
I think I have just ended up doing that. I just sort of fell into it. I prefer this way of working and I do find it really interesting. I think conceptually if you are just talking to other dancers the project you are working on seems to me to become rather small where if you are taking with people working in other art forms it allows possibilities to grow.
For example, if I talk to a sound artist, they add in their sonic vision to the project and if I talk to someone who works with film they talk about what the images might be, what the stage needs to look like. You have a back and forth with other artists and that really works for me. I really do enjoy that way of working. It helps me to discover new ways of interpreting the work through my movement.
It has become the norm over the last few years to work this way. It is a sign of the times in that, over the last five years, if you wanted funding or support, you would be asked how you were pushing your art form, how were you generating shifts and changes in the movement of dance.
Photograph Courtesy of Talitha Maslin
How many of your own works have you produced?
I have nearly realised my first full length production. I did one piece of work called “Siren” with the Gogi Dance Collective. It was done in collaboration with two visual artists and it took place on a beach. That was a 35 to 40 minute piece.
I have worked on other smaller projects of my own, but I am working on my own full length production. It is called “In to the Deep” and it is a solo work. It’s a multidisciplinary work created in collaboration with theorbo player and composer Matthew Jones. I’m hoping to make that into a piece which could be toured.
To see more of Talitha Maslin’s work go to the link below
