A Conversation with Melanie Lane
By Sumarlinah Raden Winoto
Melanie Lane is a choreographer and performer based between Berlin, UK and Melbourne.
You are a contemporary dancer and choreographer. Why do you dance?
I dance because it's the best thing I can do with my body and a language I feel deeply connected to. The body is something that we all share and understand, a vessel that has the potential to communicate across cultures and demographics. It has always felt like the most satisfying, active and direct way I can engage with the world and keeps me grounded, energised and curious. As I grow older, my body experiences many changes which means I am forever learning new ways to navigate my choreographic practice. It's also pretty magic to witness and as a bonus, has managed to keep me busy for the last 20 years.
You work closely with musician CLARK, who composes tracks for many of your productions. How does this collaborative relationship help you create your work?
Chris and I have worked together for around ten years and are also partners. We have always resonated with each other’s work, and so I suppose that's a lucky co-incidence in that although we practice different art forms, we share many artistic interests aesthetically, sonically, conceptually. Our collaborative relationship is mostly very instinctive and about smashing our ideas up against each other until they share a space in which they can co-exist, challenge and speak with each other.
You have worked with contemporary dance companies in Indonesia, such as in Bandung, Java and Padang Panjang, Sumatra; what has been it been like to bring your international dance experience to your mother’s homeland?
It's been a pretty unexpected journey reconnecting with my cultural heritage/history through dance, one that I am continuing to discover and learn from. I grew up not really having much of a physical connection with Indonesia and it's only been in the last decade that I've been lucky enough to spend quite a lot of time there. It began by co-incidence, in that I was working with a Belgian dance company Kobalt Works, that invited me to be a part of two independent projects based in Indonesia. It was a total jump into the deep end, I was suddenly working for 3 months at a time in a country I felt both connected to and an absolute tourist in.
In the beginning my Bahasa Indonesia was not great, so dance became this unique language for me to exchange and share experiences with local artists in Indonesia. Communicating mostly through the body was both challenging and surprising. It was and still is a powerful reminder of how much we share through our bodies and how much of our history is embedded in the way we move and express ourselves. In some ways, it has been both the best and most abstract way for me to discover and learn about my personal relationship to and understanding of cultural heritage. Since then I've been engaged with many different projects in Indonesia as a performer, choreographer, collaborator, artistic mentor and teacher. I still feel like, and still am a foreigner when I am there and that certainly informs the way I engage as an artist in Indonesia. I'm very aware of my western history and privilege and so there is a sensitivity to that shift in culture that I try to position myself with. Indonesia is so vast, rich and complex in its diversity of cultures, so I feel like it's a space that has much to discover, and many questions to ask around tradition, identity and re-imaging the future.
Speaking of your mother; what has she taught you?
She has definitely taught me resilience and strength. She immigrated to Australia when she was 28 and has lived with polio since she was a child. She raised me as a single parent since I was a teenager, so as a disabled, immigrant, woman she is pretty fierce. She also cooks the best Indo food which has taught me where to set the bar for Indonesian cuisine. Growing up, she never taught or spoke to me in Bahasa or Javanese language. At the time I think she was focused on assimilating into Australian culture, something that I think was probably common during the 70's/80's/90's. These days she is retired and spends the majority of her time hanging out with her Indonesian community of Ibu Ibus in Canberra. It's interesting that after 45 years of living in Australia, she finds the most comfort in her Indonesian roots.
Being multiracial can involve a sense of fluidity, or elasticity. This is something embedded in my dance practice. Do you see it in yours?
Honestly for most of my career I didn't really consider my multi-racial background in my dance practice. I was always simply influenced by and in conversation with the people around me, who were mostly European. When I started to spend more time in Indonesia, then yes, I started to see myself spill into this other culture and begin to find a sense of fluidity. I experience it as a space of in-between-ness which can feel both comforting and discombobulating. I'm learning to enjoy occupying that space and discovering how it can manifest in forms of dance that feel 'new', transient or even absurd. Last year I created a work that speaks to this experience called 'Personal Effigies'. I'd never addressed my cultural heritage in my work before so it felt vulnerable, but it certainly unlocked a potentiality in my practice that I now know I can access. It's a space where there are many contradictions which I find super interesting to navigate – such as the sense of simultaneous belonging and foreign-ness, a curiosity to fantasise about both ancestral and future bodies, or when I learn traditional Indonesian dances my body both resists and embraces it.
In any case, I find the experience of contradiction an inspiring departure point for generating choreography and a large part of who I am and how I navigate the world.
What do you find important for how you see yourself reflected in the world? What do you wish you would see more of?
I often feel there is an impossibility to really reflect all the complex histories that we embody. I am an Anglo-Australian/Indonesian, but have spent the majority of my adult life in Europe. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what is important for me to see reflected, but I know that I'm enjoying the potential to invent new ways to be seen. I find comfort in the experience of attempting newness. In the act of attempting there is a sense of searching, adapting, transforming—a kind of morphing state that speaks to how we navigate the world.
I'd love to see a dialogue around cultural heritage more normalised and celebrated in early education. I feel like it's a defining part of how we can understand ourselves and each other in relation to the world from an early age. Throughout most of my childhood education, I don't have many memories of having addressed my own or any of my friend's cultural backgrounds. Wouldn't it be great to establish the concept of interconnectivity between cultures from a young age?
I'd love to see more representation of gender and cultural diversity in the leaders of major performing arts companies. For example, in an art form (dance) where women are the majority in the field, it seems mad that there aren't more women in top positions not just in Australia but also globally. More space for everyone to be seen in an art form that can give visibility to all of our diverse, beautiful bodies.
Has being ethnically ambiguous played a role in your life?
I suppose identifying with my ethnicity has always been something that weaves in and out of my life at various intensities. The closer I am to the reality of it, the more amplified and vice versa. I've certainly felt the ambiguity of how others see me, as I am not always visibly identifiable as ethnic – however people often identify 'something other in me'. I don't take offence; I enjoy and embrace the curiosity of others. As a kid it was different, I have memories of denying my ethnicity, wanting to assimilate. Basic childish racism in school was most probably the source of my angst. Eventually I grew out of it and so did the bullies. I guess honestly, I've pretty much lived a reasonably privileged life. Again, it's only really in the last decade, now that I'm older and can view my history with a clearer perspective, that I've had the space to want to learn more from my Indonesian heritage. I feel I've neglected some part of me and I need to catch up before it's lost, there is an urgency and desire that has perhaps accumulated over time, largely unnoticed until more recently.
Professional dance, though especially ballet, is full of barriers for people of colour, even though our communities have been dancing since time immemorial. In the years you have worked in the professional dance world, what changes have you seen?
There are so many forms of dance and each have their way of offering space for modes of expression and representation. Having spent a lot of time between Indonesia and Australia I am learning how traditional dance forms and contemporary forms can both speak to each other but can also be vastly foreign from one another. It's a turbulent relationship that is tricky to navigate and I have been thinking a lot about how this informs the larger spectrum of dance and its representation of ethnicity. It's complex territory and feels like a whole other lengthy conversation.
I can't speak for the ballet world, except for that it is a dance form that is traditionally derived from Anglo/European roots and there is certainly much work to be done in representing people of colour. However, I have worked with and know of many ballet dancers that are ethnically diverse, so there is definitely work being done.
In my experience, contemporary dance has always been a form that embraces cultural diversity. Having spent most of my professional career in Europe, I have been fortunate to have worked with dance artists from across the globe from a diversity of cultures. I do feel that the independent dance community in Australia work hard to embrace diversity. It's not an easy industry to survive in with few work opportunities and limited arts funding, it can often feel like an uphill battle. But there are initiatives, festivals and programs that focus specifically on supporting cultural exchange, performance and research. For example, I recently undertook an Asialink Arts residency in Bandung Indonesia which has resulted in an ongoing project I will pursue through to 2021 with a team of Indonesian collaborators. In the last few years I have been really excited to see more Indigenous performance makers claim space in the contemporary dance scene, let's see more of that. In addition to this important and necessary work I recognise that contemporary bodies can also be more than their ethnic identities, each person's history is valid, important and necessary in contributing to a conversation about the future of dance.
You have choreographed and performed for CLARK’s world tours since 2016. What has your experience been, bringing contemporary dance to these spaces?
Collaborating with CLARK has been loads of fun. We share a playfulness around the dialogue between music and dance that is both emotive and aesthetic. Dance can be tricky in the context of music festivals in that it can easily slip into the cliché of club dance, sexualised and commercial – so we have worked hard on creating a live show that works with dance more as a sculptural entity that pulsates and transforms in dialogue with the music. It's quite a trip, an immediate, amplified connection with an audience. I don't perform the shows anymore (I'm too old now) but I often go along to see them. The festival/club context presents a whole new set of parameters as opposed to a theatre. There's no sitting in the dark in a comfy theatre chair with the time and space in your head to reflect on and consider the conceptual narratives that are presented to you. Instead it feels more like a visual narrative of sculptural, visceral effects performed by humans. The performances are more about a shared energy with an audience – a direct physical connection between the music and bodies.
I see a theme of defying definition, transcending understanding in your art practice. Are these concepts things you actively work with? Do these themes relate to your understanding of culture?
I am definitely interested in narratives of otherness. Otherness as a shared experience rather than an exclusive one. It's a theme I resonate with a lot, in that I feel we all inherently experience otherness in a unique and personal way, however it is a not a subject we necessarily feel we share as a society. I am often looking for experiences of otherness as a way to understand culture and society in relationship with our bodies. Our bodies hold so much knowledge and information and performance is a powerful tool to excavate that information into something we can reflect on or identify with.
Wonderwomen is a dance piece you conceived for two body builders, Rosie Harte and Nathalie Schmidt. It can be read as a subversion of the “strong woman” understanding we usually see in the media. Can you tell us about making this piece? What was important to you?
I created this work at a time when I was interested in the relationship between highly physical training and femininity. In the same year I created a work `Re-make' with and for a former soloist of the Australian Ballet, Juliet Burnett, that speaks to experience of a highly trained classical ballet dancer - her relationship to the history embedded in her body and the image that her body is trained to portray. In many ways, both works speak to the paradox's that these bodies experience within their respective crafts through the rigorous training and a highly amplified culture of perfecting physique. Wonderwomen was a collaborative journey with body builders Rosie Harte (UK) and Nathalie Schmidt (Germany), both successful athletes in their field. I became interested in this sport when Nathalie invited me to choreograph her routine for a Las Vegas competition. I was fascinated by her story and the mode of performance and representation of femininity through her work. It's a craft that resists the dominant narrative of femininity – representing physical strength, sensuality and empowerment, but also pushes the body into its most vulnerable states.
As a dancer I resonate with this paradox and was interested in working with performers that speak to the experience of stability versus instability. It was important for me to gain some physical understanding of Rosie and Nathalie's experience and so throughout the creation period I dieted and trained with them. It was super challenging and at times brutal. What struck me hardest was the experience of radical mental discipline, even more so than physical discipline. There is a level of control over the body that requires deep care and attention, and although there is great power and strength achieved in the body, at their highest point of competition they at their most weak and fragile. This was the main departure point for creating Wonderwomen. Despite the stigma and challenging questions around their sport, these women share a deep knowledge of their bodies and limits, and are fierce activists for empowering women.
I love choreographed music videos, but I feel like creations you have been a part of, like Peak Magnetic, are on a whole other level! Can you share some of the differences between creating live dance performances, and these very different forms of visual masterpieces?
The Peak Magnetic video drew from the choreography I created for Clark's live show; however I wasn't able to be in the studio during the shoot. My dear friend and collaborator Kiani Del Valle worked closely with the director to design the choreography on the day. Some other work I've done includes a collaboration with video artist Amos Gebhardt for their video artwork 'Evanescence', Clark's Death Peak Live video and a music video for LA producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. I suppose every project is unique in its process of creation so it’s hard to say what the concrete differences are, apart from the obvious shift from the live experience to film. Music videos are interesting in that they are short and sweet, the content is direct – one simple idea that flows with the experience of the music. Editing choreography is certainly the most radical difference to live performance – the ability to cut and paste movement into a tightly wound dynamic score.
'Evanescence' conceived by Amos Gebhardt was a beautiful project to be a part of. Choreographed for 40 performers representing physical and cultural diversity, the work was filmed in 4 natural locations - desert, rainforest, salt lakes and rock mountains. I worked with Amos to develop a choreographic ritual that was performed naked by 10 performers in each location to represent the becoming and decline of the human in and of the natural world. Viewed across four screens in a gallery context, the work offers an experience to reflect on the body in a continuum of time and place.
What are you currently excited about?
Upcoming collaborations. I'm excited about working with a bunch of super talented artists across a number of projects this year and next. I'm always feeling grateful to be able to learn from, share and collaborate with people I admire.