Page 43 - DANCE 2020 Full Time Studies Guide

Full-Time STudieS Guide 2020
An image from ‘The Elsewhen Series’, a work by Marojevi´c and Theo Clinkard.
Leah Marojević
Freelance contemporary dance artist
Where are you from? South London, UK.
Where did you undertake your full-time training?
Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.
How did you find the transition from full-time studies to the profession?
The closer I approached graduating the more I realised how desperate I was to have a career in dance, and the more I felt this was impossibly hard with everyone’s journeys into starting working being so disparate. I understood the linear audition-to-job journey, but was totally overwhelmed by the other “right time, right place” circumstances that I would hear over and over as people’s keys into the field of dance.
I was fortunate to study with Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year directly after graduating for three months. This was a way to continue dancing after graduating and meet
with professionals in order to further understand myself as an artist in my own right, and have space to question what direction I was interested in pursuing. This was an incredibly important time for me as I was given room to be confused and excited about a future I couldn’t quite work out or understand.
What were the most important
benefits of your studies?
The women I studied with at the VCA were
and continue to be among my biggest inspirations, treasured colleagues and continued sources of strength and motivation amid the precariousness of our work as independent artists. Nothing keeps me going more than the important work of these women.
The teachers who offered real-talk, practical perspectives into working as an artist were of profound importance to me. We were pushed to develop as thinkers, researchers and collaborators as well as dancers, and this was hugely beneficial to begin learning at such an early point.
How quickly did you gain employment
upon graduation?
Five months after university I started to work with dancemaker and performer Theo Clinkard who is now, five years on, a dearest friend and regular artistic collaborator.
Tell us a little about your practice.
Currently I am living in London. I work between what sometimes feels like a multitude of different roles. Primarily
I work as a performer in collaboration
with various contemporary dance and performance artists, namely Yorkshire-based Theo and Colette Sadler, among others. Over the last five years I have developed on-going artistic relationships with different makers and find myself working in a different city almost every week embodying positions that lie anywhere between choreographer, dramaturge, producer, outside eye, copywriter, rehearsal director and teacher.
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PHOTO: ROSWITHA CHESHER