The founding argument of Chunky Move — articulated by Gideon Obarzanek when he established the company in 1995 and debuted it at the Melbourne International Arts Festival — was deceptively simple: that contemporary dance in Australia did not need to be imported. Not that Australian choreographers should be indifferent to international practice; Obarzanek had worked extensively in Europe and brought that knowledge home. But the founding conviction was that an Australian movement vocabulary was possible — a physical language developed from the specific bodies, spaces, cultures, and conditions of this country rather than adopted wholesale from the German or American or British traditions that had dominated the international field.
This was not, in 1995, an obvious proposition. Australian contemporary dance had a history, but not the kind of institutional depth that could sustain a company of genuine ambition. The Chunky Move project — built first in Sydney, relocated to Melbourne in 1997 when the company became Victoria’s state contemporary dance company — was an experiment in whether an institution could generate that depth from within, through accumulated artistic research rather than by leveraging an inherited tradition.
The answer, over three decades, is yes. What Chunky Move has built in Melbourne is not simply a company but an ecosystem: a set of artistic relationships, training methods, collaborative practices, and institutional connections that have shaped the careers of a generation of Australian choreographers and performers. The company is not the only reason Melbourne’s dance culture is the most serious in Australia, but it is the primary one.
Obarzanek’s Founding Vision and Its Elaboration
Gideon Obarzanek’s work as artistic director, from 1995 to 2012, was characterised by a consistent willingness to incorporate technology — video, motion capture, interactive systems — as a structural element of choreography rather than as decoration. Works like Glow (2006), which used a motion-responsive projection system to create a visual field that responded to the dancer’s movement in real time, became internationally significant pieces that toured extensively and established Chunky Move’s reputation as a company making work that could not be simply replicated by other companies elsewhere. The technology was never the point; the technology was in service of a question about what the moving body can do when its relationship to its environment is radically altered.
Anouk van Dijk, who succeeded Obarzanek as artistic director in 2012, brought a different but complementary intelligence to the company. Her countertechnique — a movement system she had developed over her European career, based on principles of momentum and spatial awareness that differ markedly from the postural conventions of ballet-derived contemporary training — gave the company a specific physical identity that is visible in the bodies of its performers. Countertechnique produces dancers who look different in action: quicker to adapt, less bound by the pedestals that conventional training creates around certain movements. Van Dijk’s years at Chunky Move deepened the company’s investment in the performer’s intelligence as distinct from the choreographer’s instruction.
Chunky Move, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank. chunkymove.com
Lucy Guerin Inc. and the Melbourne Choreographic Ecosystem
Lucy Guerin’s company — Lucy Guerin Inc., based in Fitzroy — represents a different strand of the same conviction: that Melbourne is a place where original choreographic intelligence can be developed and sustained, and that the work it produces is not derivative of international models but in genuine conversation with them. Guerin, who worked with Chunky Move in its early years (her company produced Tense Dave in 2005, which won a Bessie Award in New York for outstanding choreography), has built a practice that is formally rigorous and theatrically intelligent — concerned with the dramaturgy of performance as well as its physical language.
What Guerin’s work shares with the best of the Chunky Move programme is a seriousness about structure: the conviction that the decisions made about time, space, and repetition in a dance work are as fundamental as the movement material itself. This is choreographic thinking, not choreographic decoration, and it produces work that rewards sustained attention in a way that spectacle-based dance rarely does. Melbourne’s dance culture — Chunky Move, Lucy Guerin Inc., and the smaller companies and independent practitioners that operate in the same ecosystem — has been shaped by this commitment to structural intelligence over several decades.
Lucy Guerin Inc., fitzroyarts.com.au — performances throughout the year at various Melbourne venues.
Dancehouse and the Independent Ecology
Dancehouse, in Carlton’s North Carlton neighbourhood, is the institutional infrastructure that makes the independent dance ecology viable: a centre for development, research, and performance that provides studio space, administrative support, and a platform for work that is not yet — and may never need to be — at the scale of a company like Chunky Move or Lucy Guerin Inc. The building, a converted North Carlton terrace with studio extensions, has been a gathering point for Melbourne’s independent dance practitioners for decades.
What Dancehouse does that is not fully visible from outside the dance community is maintain a conversation across the ecosystem — between choreographers at different career stages, between performers and directors, between the local practice and the international field that Dancehouse’s residency programmes bring in. Melbourne’s dance culture is not simply the sum of its companies; it is the density of professional relationships that Dancehouse and similar structures sustain. The annual programme of seasons and residencies is worth attending for anyone interested in where Australian movement practice is developing before it reaches the main stages.
Dancehouse, 150 Princes Street, North Carlton. dancehouse.com.au
An Insider Note
The best way to follow Melbourne’s dance culture is to attend across registers: a Chunky Move season at Southbank’s major stages, a Lucy Guerin Inc. production at Malthouse or the Southbank Theatre, and a Dancehouse season or residency showing in Carlton — all within the same month if the programming allows. The experience of the same city’s movement culture at different scales and stages of development tells you more than any single company can. Melbourne is the only city in Australia where this kind of sustained engagement with contemporary dance is practically possible, which is itself the argument.