Luke George: NOW NOW NOW

Photo courtesy Jeff Busby  

As across most art forms, the challenges faced by emerging choreographers probably make their choice of career more of a brave venture than an astute one, especially if their work and efforts in the contemporary dance scene are produced without support or patronage.

The Australian contemporary dance scene is already filled with a number of successful artists and dance companies from the Sydney Dance Company to Chunky Move to Lucy Guerin Inc. to BalletLab to KAGE naming just some. These companies are known and recognised for the form of contemporary dance they create. And their works together with the companies own image are all strongly bound to the persona of artistic directors. For example there would never have been a Sydney Dance Company without Graeme Murphy nor a Chunky Move without Gideon Obarzanek nor a Lucy Guerin Inc. without Lucy nor a KAGE without Kate Denborough and so on…

It is in these realms that Luke George is finding his feet, so to speak. The once Artistic Director of Tasmania’s youth dance company Stompin, who graduated from the VCA, has now spent close to ten years dancing, creating new choreography and working collaboratively with one or more of Australia’s contemporary dance crew.

And perhaps his own star is rising, because not only was he nominated earlier this year for the Outstanding Achievement in Independent Dance category at the Australian Dance Awards for his work Lifesize, but he is also now about to premier his latest work NOW NOW NOW a Lucy Guerin commission at Dancehouse.

Luke George started out life as a dancer in Tasmania, and says he knew around 15 years of age what he wanted to do. “I was pretty idealistic, in that when I was 14 or 15, I thought I’m the most excited about this and will start my career in this. First I went into theatre, theatre led to dance and from that point I wasn’t as excited about anything else as I was about dance. There was kind of no option.”

He says his parents were great when he announced his career choice, and apart from telling him to understand the realities of an artist’s life, they encouraged him to otherwise go for it.

And did he understand the realities of the career choice he had just made?

“I don’t think I did" he admits when talking to ArtsHub recently. "Once I got out of college and into the workforce then I sort of went “oh”. I left the VCA and had to return later to graduate… I failed a few things as ballet wasn’t my strong point. But I graduated at the end of 1999 and joined Chunky Move who were offering some amazing back to back contracts back then. So I have been a practising artist now for over ten years…”

And like in much career development success for many of us, work came not only because of talent but who he knew.

Luke was working with Philip Adams from BalletLab at the time he started working for Chunky Move. Adams was making Amplification and teaching at the VCA when Luke was studying there. They connected and now Luke is one of the mainstays at BalletLab together with Brooke Stamp.

Phillip Adams then asked Luke to make a work with him about Humpty Dumpty. That was Luke George’s very first job, and it toured to the Mardi Gras festival.

Of course in a fabulous six degrees of separation moment Gideon Obarzanek designed the set for that piece, so he and Luke too connected. Chunky Move then asked Luke to understudy for a tour they were doing and the rest as they say is history.

Ironically enough considering the VCA’s current calamitous situation, the institution has been at the core of all of these artist’s development.

“Personally I had a really challenging time at the VCA” Luke recalls. “I stepped into an intense training programme that I had never had before. But in the end it was really worthwhile – I met a lot of people, and developed a lot of collaborations, which led to things that would lead to other things.”

For Luke George dancing and choreographing are interchangeable. “I have always been choreographing. And I have been performing and choreographing at the same. And it seems every now and then the volume turns up on one or the other, although at the moment they are both up!”

Indeed Luke is dancing in Now Now Now as well as choreographing, and perhaps this need to perform is at the heart of many a choreographers own evolution as artists. It is interesting to note that both Gideon Obarzanek and Phillip Adams are about to create works where they too will perform after a long absence from the stage. Both have also just recently celebrated the ten year anniversary of their companies.

When asked whether he feels challenged by the new breed of choreographers already leaving their mark on the industry, Luke admits he constantly feels this.

“Even with those coming out of college and training at the moment, there is a huge cultural distance between us. I am working with them now and they are fabulous but I am constantly surprised by them.”

“My work at Stompin always highlighted that. There was always a difference in every year and every generation. Yet in a lot of ways dance hasn’t changed much. I don’t think it’s a rapidly evolving art form. It’s still got such strong patterns in its foundations and its traditions, and we need to be continually questioning that. Like anything, we should always question why we need to do things the way we do them, and why we feel the need to uphold these traditions.”

So where does he see his place in this creative landscape that is the Australian contemporary dance scene? And does he feel the anxiety of needing to be new?

“Every artist would feel some kind of anxiety about that” he replies unhesitatingly. “If you are someone who is creative and putting something out to an audience in a contemporary sense, you are always kind of grappling with the anxiety of that.”

“For me it’s not about being successful, or that kind of ambition having a value behind it. It’s more about a desire to create and you do have to push a little and carve that out and set it right for yourself, otherwise it does really float away.”

The current work NOW NOW NOW took two years to create and will be performed for five nights. This is something that clearly irks Luke George. So what happens after that? Does he start immediately on the next work?

“I was thinking about this just the other night" he admits. "What if someone came and saw the work and loved what I did so much, they wanted to commission me to make a new work for them. What would I say? Maybe I could say something like –‘I don’t want to make a new work now! This is the new work! I need to stay in this moment a while longer’. You see that kind of creative fatigue in yourself when you are pushing things out because you think that’s expected of you…”

“And when you make something, expecting it to be picked up and toured, but it doesn’t happen, then that’s a long journey. I went through that and it was really tough. Last year when I wasn’t getting any funding, I thought this just sucks! How can I possibly keep going?”

“And then I realised, you just need to let go of any expectations like this, and just keep creating. Make what you want to make, and even if you don’t get funding, do what you can do, and perform where you can perform.”