TWENTY-TWO members of the Canberra Dance Theatre’s GOLD (“growing old disgracefully”) company are marking its 40th anniversary by working with a renowned choreographer from Wales.

Carol Brown is a freelance community dance artist, choreographer and lecturer who has led community dance in Wales for 30 years and has created countless productions on professional and community casts of up to 300 people, in community settings, theatres and on television.

She has worked in Europe, Africa and Asia Minor on projects such as the Adugna Project, where she worked with children in Ethiopia. She has organised cultural exchanges for Welsh groups with partners in many countries and recently set up the Troy Boyz company who perform street dance to Greek classics, and the “Dragon’s Heart & Dragon’s Soul” company of diverse capacity artists.

GOLD is made up of talented and energetic people over the age of 55. Established in 2011 by Liz Lea, Philip Piggin and Jane Ingall, the group has toured to the UK and Europe and performed at national institutions, such as the National Museum of Australia, where they performed in “Great Sport!”, a site-specific work devised by Liz Lea which won the award for “outstanding achievement in community dance” at the 2017 Australian Dance Awards.

The dance work they’ll be working on was originally created by Brown in 2014, inspired by Dylan Thomas’ poem “The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”, but she’ll be encouraging members of GOLD to infuse the structure of the dance with their individuality.

“It’s about our connection with all things in the universe through the force of energy that permeates everything,” she says.

GOLD will be performing Carol Brown’s work in Canberra Dance Theatre’s studios, 1 Kingsley Street, Acton, 3pm, on Thursday, January 25.

 

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