Karen van Ulzen meets up with Anouk van Dijk, the Dutch-born artistic director of Chunky Move dance company in Melbourne.
In 2012 Anouk van Dijk left her home in Holland to take up the job of artistic director of Chunky Move in Australia. It is no small matter to pull up roots and move to another country, especially with a partner and young daughter in tow. But Dijk appears quite at home in the spartan, Jeffery Smart-like environs of the South Melbourne studios. She says she and her husband realised they must be settling in when they realised they had stopped making comparisons with everything back home: “It was a type of threshold,” she says. “We are slowly assimilating to the new normal.”
The temptation to ask her to keep comparing, for this interview, is irresistible. After all, her three major works created since arriving in Australia have all touched on her observations of her new country, in a way that can read almost like a diary. Her debut work, An Act of Now, arose out of “reflecting on [her] own cultural identity”. “I now look ahead to unknown territory, using familiar stepping stones to discover new insights into a society that could be like my own, but that is profoundly different,” she wrote in her program note. 247, which premiered in March 2013, was explicity drawn on the new perspective of “living upside down -- surrounded by new people with different beliefs, backgrounds and ways of communicating,” while Complexity of Belonging (2014) explores, among other things, the migrant experience. Any reflection on new experience is almost by definition an act of comparison, and Dijk has much to offer in way of comparisons.
You can read the rest of this fascinating interview with Anouk van Dijk in the April/May edition of Dance Australia. Download Dance Australia to your tablet via the Dance Australia app, available from iTunes or purchase the mag from your selected retail outlets. You can also subscribe here.
Chunky Move is offering an intensive course in Countertechnique this winter. Find out more here.