ON VIEW: ICONS

DANCE

4 Dec

Recently landed: Moving Portraits

Gracia’s written response to Sue Healey’s On View:Icons, especially for Fjord Review.

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Beneath a tree also over a century old is where I meet dancer and artist Eileen Kramer, and where the 60-minute loop will end. And it feels fitting, on the heels of her recent death on the 15th of November, 2024, at 110-years-of-age, to start here, at effectively the end of Sue Healey’s screening of On View: Icons. Showing at Dancehouse’s Sylvia Staehli Theatre, from 4pm in the afternoons onwards, as part of the launch of Dance (Lens) Mini the audience is invited to duck into the cool, dark reprieve of the theatre at any time and immerse themselves in a three-channel, cine-portrait of six Australian dance legends.[i] As timing has it, this is where I am to begin. As the familiar strains of the Blue Danube waltz lilt “let us dance,” Kramer imparts, “it’s been a long journey, but I don’t care about age, that means nothing to me; I’m more concerned about spirit, and the spirit has no age.”

Healey’s On View: Icons, a decade-long itself in the making, has distilled, through both camera and edit, the essence of six remarkable dancers, and they are so faithfully, and truly rendered, it is as if they are there before me.[ii] As I pad through the darkness of the space and find a cushion on the floor, Kramer recounts her own delight at seeing a performance in the conservatorium which sparked within her the desire to dance. Her mother had taken her to a Gertrud Bodenwieser concert, and “there before my eyes, these beautiful girls, dancing. I said, oh! That’s what I’ve been wanting all my life: that created action!” Kramer went on to become a student under Madame Bodenwieser for three-years before becoming a member of her company, and having stepped in the fairy ring, never stopped dancing. As she silvers on the screens in triplicate, re-enacting the soft opening gesture of the Waterlilies, it is as if she too is part of a continuous loop, ever dancing.

[i] Dance (Lens) Mini presented four screendance artists in Moving Portraits, a conversation and screening about dance, film, and portraiture, and the history and legacy of Australian women in dance. Throughout the discussion, Moving Portraits included screenings of Doing the Work (2024) by Siobhan Murphy, terra (installation 2024) by Cobie Orger with Alice Cummins, and was followed by a screening of Sue Healey’s On View: Icons.

[ii] Healey’s On View project began in 2014 as a series of digital cine-portraits featuring dance artists Martin del Amo, Shona Erskine, Benjamin Hancock, Raghav Handa and Nalina Wait. I first saw On View: Quintet at Dancehouse in the upstairs studio as part of Dance Massive 2015.