Sally Chance Dance
Australia
Sally Chance works in the interdisciplinary space between community cultural and art form development using dance-theatre. In collaboration with dancers Felecia Hick and Stephen Noonan, and musician/composer Heather Frahn, Sally creates performance works for children aged three years and younger. The company has devised six works – This (Baby) Life, Nursery, Touch & Go, Flower꽃, Seashore and Wonder – presenting around Australia and internationally. Sally also co-initiated Our Corka Bubs with Gina Rings and Country Arts SA. The works contribute to the field of Theatre for Early Years (TEY), where ‘theatre’ encompasses all performance forms, including dance and circus. Sally has completed TEY practice-led doctoral study at the Queensland University of Technology.
Sally’s practice has evolved from her training in Community Dance at Trinity Laban, London, and her observation of how her dance-theatre develops under the influence of specific populations. She was founding Artistic Director of Restless Dance Theatre, pioneering disability cultural practices. She was Artistic Director of the Australian Festival for Young People (now DreamBIG), commissioning four new works for young audiences and extending the regional reach of the 2003, 2005 and 2007 events.
Since 2007, with momentum provided by her Australia Council Fellowship (2007-2009), Sally has made visible the cultural lives of babies and very young children. She also works in the field of perinatal infant mental health and is an experienced teaching artist.
Stephen, Felecia and Heather are similarly multi-skilled. They see their expertise in dance and music as the baseline for the company’s TEY practice, which has the broader goal of being an artistic meeting point between performers and audiences. The Sally Chance Dance company achieves this because of the performers’ capacity for ensemble and improvisation, a philosophy that values the co-creative presence of children and a skill-set that maximises the child-performer encounter.