Non-stop Lina

There could hardly be a busier independent artist than this award winning dancer/choreographer.

Slim, brown eyed, lithe and cheerful, and at an age when many dancers have already retired, Lina Limosani is as busy as ever – and she’s never been one to stand still for long. Growing up in Melbourne, she was intent on being a gymnast. “I used to collect every gymnastic picture you can imagine and cover all my exercise books at school with them,” she tells me over a cup of coffee. But nearing the end of school, she had no idea what she wanted to do until a careers adviser recommended, “Just choose something you love doing”. Lina says: “I just loved dancing, getting out on a dance floor and letting myself go … and I remember when I was a child, choreographing dances for our family events and birthdays, and teaching my sister how to do things. So I guess it was always there, unconsciously, but I hadn’t recognised it at all.”
With no previous dance training, she was intimidated by the look of the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), but discovered the Box Hill TAFE course, and so started classical ballet at the age of seventeen. She’d done some jazz at school, and the mixture of classical and contemporary really suited her. Laurel Martyn was head of the course, and “it was a great time, a really exciting time”, Limosani remarks. “I still have all my books! I learnt so much from her. She really pushed me. I wouldn’t have my career, be where I am now . . . I really enjoyed the classical, which was completely foreign to me. I enjoyed the challenge. I really hated the contemporary!” She laughs at the reminiscence.


On graduating, she took off for England with nothing particular in mind, except perhaps teaching. Instead she found some university dance courses to take before returning home, to enter the WA Academy of the Performing Arts, the VCA (no longer intimidating), and joining Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) in 2000. Garry Stewart had just taken over, and it was an adventurous time. As well as dancing a very demanding repertoire, touring in Australia, the US, UK, Europe and parts of Asia, Limosani was honing her choreographic skills in ADT’s “Ignition” series – programs of short works by company members and other independent choreographers. In 2003 her Blind Spot prophetically won her the Adelaide Critics’ Circle Emerging Artist Award. . . .


This is an extract from an interview by Alan Brissenden in the June/July issue of Dance Australia magazine.

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