Making all the right moves

By Danielle Brigham December 2002

To an outsider, the well-worn sneakers would seem at odds with the neat attire of Joanne Leighton. It's the first thing I notice when she enters the empty theatre space.

Most of the time it's her feet that do the talking, but today she's articulating her love for movement in words and hand gestures. Her words are thoughtful and measured, but for this Australian-born, Belgium-based choreographer, it ultimately comes down to body language. Physicality has always been her natural instinct.

"I always had my own fascination with movement and dancing," she says.

This fascination has mapped Leighton's path from Adelaide to Brussels. And now, at 36 years old, she has become one of the most innovative forces in European dance.

"Ultimately I really loved dancing, and I was attracted to it for the kinds of movements that one could do and the kind of physicality that came with growing up in Australia."

"You're climbing trees and running around on the street," says Leighton, recollecting as much in her hand gestures as her words. "You're in contact with nature and all those fantastic things in the Australian environment and in the Indigenous culture."

"It was a very physical growing up time, which is very different to a European experience. If you like, movement starts there, in your early years."

Leighton didn't take up ballet classes until she was eleven, and it was a year after completing high school that she made the definitive step into the adult world of dance. At age 17, long after her childhood friends had hung up their tutus, Leighton moved to Melbourne where she auditioned at the Victorian College of the Arts.

"They told me that I'd never be a dancer," she remembers with a smile. "They didn't think that I had the possibility to be involved in dance as a performer, but told me that I could do the teachers’ course."

Leighton insisted on being admitted into the Bachelor of Arts in Performance. On graduating she accepted a place at the Australian Dance Theatre, where she performed for four years.

By her own admission, Joanne Leighton is "fairly tenacious". Eighteen years and many thousands of kilometres later, she lives and experiences dance in almost every sense - performance, teaching and choreography.

Today I am speaking to her in Dublin, where she has completed a piece for the Dance Theatre of Ireland (DTI). Her husband, prominent Australian composer Peter Crosbie, takes credit for the original music score. After two months working in Ireland, Leighton will return to her young family in Belgium.

The schedule of rehearsals, media interviews and nightly performances is hectic, but she remains composed.

"She's always very calm and focused," says Loretta Yurick, of the Dance Theatre of Ireland.

I ask Leighton how being Australian has informed the way she lives and creates art in Europe today. She answers that it’s quite simply "a way of thinking".

"If you ask an Australian what they want to do it's like, 'OK I want to go there'. There are no chains," she says, clicking her fingers to emphasise the point. "It's a very free, incisive, intelligent culture."

It's perhaps this sense of boundless daring that propelled the 25-year-old Leighton beyond Australia.

Factors such as geographic isolation and the relative paucity of dance funding in Australia meant that the diversity of experience and opportunities were limited.

"Ten years ago there wasn't the focus on Asia in dance like there is now in Australia. There was a really strong focus towards what had been done, and what was being done, in both Europe and America."

Leighton was faced with a choice between the two outward-looking dance traditions. Being awarded a travel grant by the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Trust made the decision for her, and she embarked on a round the world trip in 1991.

For almost a year London captivated Leighton as a dance spectator. She never made it to the US: "I still want to get to America. I cashed in my ticket after one year," she laughs.

When she returned to dancing herself, it was with a leaning towards choreography, and a year on she had three UK productions to her name. Ultimately she followed her nose to the opportunities in Belgium's thriving dance scene.

Today Leighton is one of the most sought after dance teachers in Europe. During the five months of the year when she's not giving classes across the continent, Leighton is running Velvet asbl, her own Brussels-based dance company. Since its foundation in 1993, she has taken a total of ten performances on tour through Europe and Australia.

As a choreographer, she is also regularly invited to produce works for professional dance companies, and her latest creations, The Simulacra Stories, is currently touring in cities across Ireland.

Loretta Yurick, the co-artistic director of the Dance Theatre of Ireland (DTI), became interested in Leighton's work after seeing a solo performance in Switzerland last year.

"She's a very strong and a very intelligent performer," says Yurick. "There's a lot of wisdom in her movement. It just clicked for me."

For Yurick, having Leighton create The Simulacra Stories with DTI was a rewarding cultural exchange. "What I liked about the process of working with Joanne is that she speaks fairly intellectually with people about ways of creating movement."

"Ireland is a very literary culture, but sometimes choreographers and dancers don't use enough words in their work. Joanne uses words like 'superimposition’, ‘duplication’, ‘original copy' that are really wonderful literary ways of looking at the writing of choreography."

What distinguishes Leighton's work is that her artistic research extends beyond the discipline of dance. Her recent works make reference to the relationships between the creative processes in literature, film and, especially, architecture.

"It's almost a direct application to the thinking, and often the structuring, behind those other forms which I'm then applying directly to either the body or the space," says Leighton.

The Simulacra Stories is a multi-layered experience. Leighton toys with the various conventions of dance theatre, creating meanings with sound, lighting and space.

The public is seated around the performance space, with dancers frequently crossing the perimeters to occupy the strategically empty seats among the audience.

These kinds of performances 'in the round' are ambitious at the best of times, says freelance art critic Don Smith. He has been reviewing dance in Britain and Europe for over thirty years, but The Simulacra Stories is the first Leighton work he has seen.

"Joanne has a lyrical style that I found wonderfully engaging," says Smith. "She has lovely, interesting ideas which she interprets through the dancers very well and I thought she put the piece together beautifully."

"Joanne is certainly right up there with some of the better European choreographers. I want to see more of her work," he adds.

It seems her well-worn shoes have taken Joanne Leighton far, but the story may not end in Dublin or even Brussels.

"I love Australia and I love the life that one can lead there. Dance is very international and you move around with it. I think that in my life I will go back to Australia."

As universal as the language of dance may be, Leighton is aware of the 'Australian-ness' within the patchwork of her art.

"In Australia we grew up thinking you can go anywhere, you can take the space," she says throwing her arms out to the horizon. "Here space is treated differently and light is very different."

"I think the way that I'm encouraging the dancers to move, I don't know if I would say that it’s Australian but it’s absolutely coming from an Australian. It is coming from my experience of space and light. And that's what I'm working with -space. It's more than the patchwork, it's the subject."