At 91, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman dances in nature at her bushland retreat outside Canberra, Mirramu Creative Arts Centre, surrounded by writers, singers and visual artists stoking their respective muses. “So many people bring up this age thing,” she says, “and my reply is that in dance we are ageless.”
A contemporary dance pioneer in Australia, Dalman has just seen the final performance of one of her “great inspirations” and occasional collaborators, dancer Eileen Kramer, in a filmed component of the dance work Afterworld, part of Sydney festival. Kramer died in November at 110. “I’m going to live to that age,” Dalman chuckles.
In Adelaide in 1965, Dalman co-created Australian Dance Theatre, running the company for a decade, confounding the era’s prejudice against modern dance and women artistic directors. She is still fired by creativity and the “exchange of energy” with audiences, but bored with people “going on about this age thing”.
She’d rather talk about what feeds longevity, pointing to medical research showing the health and mobility benefits of dancing for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients. “It’s not just pure exercise, you are adding creative activity,” she says. “You’re engaging the left and right side of the brain. Eileen kept saying, ‘The creativity keeps me alive’.”
Dalman has been consulting with ADT’s current artistic director, Daniel Riley, on the company’s 60th anniversary production A Quiet Language, opening in February as part of the Adelaide festival. The show, created by Riley, is billed as an examination of legacy, “transmuting the rebellious energy of the company’s early days into an electric new era”.
Over the past decade, Dalman herself has graced international stages, notably touring for four years as part of the Irish choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan’s critically acclaimed Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, which transposed the classical ballet to the Irish midlands. When Keegan-Dolan posted an international callout for a woman aged 60 with long white hair to play the story’s cranky, arthritic matriarch, Dalman – 82 at the time – emailed saying she had the requisite long white hair. Her character spent most of the show in a wheelchair, but Dalman says she ultimately found it a “fantastic, wonderful” experience dancing with performers 50 to 60 years younger than her.
Dalman has always been determined to dance. Born in Adelaide in 1934 to Keith Cameron Wilson, a Menzies-era federal politician, and Elizabeth Hornabrook Bonython, she enrolled in dance class at three, learning both classical ballet and modern. Later, she began an arts degree at the University of Adelaide – “much to my mother’s horror”, she says, “because women didn’t do that in those days”.
In 1957, aged 23, Dalman paid her way to London with the hope of launching a dance career. There, she saw a life-changing performance by the Mexican choreographer José Limón. “He touched my soul. I thought, ‘Oh wow, that’s how I want to dance,’” she recalls. In 1960-61 she studied at the Folkwang school in Essen, Germany, where her classmates included Pina Bausch: “She was amazing, a technical whiz.”
In Germany, Dalman met the Colombian American choreographer Eleo Pomare, who rose to prominence in the civil rights era. She created works with Pomare’s company from 1961 to 1963, living in Amsterdam with him and four other dancers. Pomare later remarked that Dalman danced “as if she swallows the heat and you feel that the heat is burning from the inside out”.
Romance was often relegated to a background-dancer role in her life. She met the Dutch master photographer Jan Dalman and their marriage lasted 12 years, producing son Andreas, born in Adelaide in 1971. There were briefer relationships over the years, too. “With mum’s relationships, the dance became a competitor,” says Andreas, a music, lighting and sound designer who has worked on Dalman’s productions. “The men didn’t like that: mum always chose the dance.” His mother, laughing, counters: “Dance had chosen me.”
Dalman returned to Australia in late 1963, and performed in the artist Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski’s experimental theatre show Sound and Image at the 1964 Adelaide festival. It inspired her to open a dance school, and in 1965 she took her students on a regional tour, alongside dancers from Royal Ballet alumnus Leslie White’s Adelaide academy.
Buoyed up by the tour’s success, Dalman and White set up Australian Dance Theatre, but the going was financially tough, and White left in 1967. Dalman put Australian Dance Theatre forward to perform in the 1968 Adelaide festival, but when it turned down her request for financial support she instead bought some half-price cruise ship tickets and took the troupe on its first international tour, sailing to the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy.
Back home, Dalman faced discrimination because of her gender: “I felt the battle, I had to keep proving myself. Even once we got a little bit of funding later, in 1973, and I’d been running the company since 1965, never in the red, this board member, a man, said, ‘Oh we have to do something about the finances, they haven’t been run correctly.’ Then he took us into the red the next year.”
Dalman remained artistic director until 1975. Then, having split with her husband, she and Andreas moved to Ventimiglia, a seaside town in northern Italy where she and Jan had bought two little rooms several years earlier. She founded a dance school and a youth dance theatre there in 1976, and it became “a place of healing”.
In 1986, on a visit home to Australia, Dalman met another mature artist, who became an inspiration: the Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, then almost 80. Ohno approached Dalman at an Adelaide festival party, not knowing who she was. “He said, ‘You’re an artist, aren’t you?’ It blew me away,” she says, recalling the sense of validation she felt. A decade later, Dalman and Andreas visited Ohno – who was still dancing, and preparing to tour the US – at his Yokohama home. “He said, ‘Oh Elizabeth, it’s so good to talk to a senior, mature artist.’” Dalman, then 60, had been contemplating ending her career. “When I met him, I realised I had to keep going.”
In 1989, Dalman bought a 40-hectare property at Bungendore, near Weereewa/Lake George, outside Canberra. The bush reminded her of Italy, dancing among the olive groves or by the river. She established Mirramu Creative Arts Centre there the same year, followed by Mirramu Dance Company in 2002.
“I’d always been inspired by nature, which I imagined as I was performing,” she says. “Now I get to live close to nature and have my dance as well. It was hard leaving Adelaide because that was my home, but the pull of this place, the land and the lake, is very powerful.”
A Quiet Language is at Odeon Theatre 26 February-7 March for Adelaide festival
