Current Activities
VCA Dance wishes to congratulate Professor Shirley McKechnie and her research team on their success in obtaining funding for a Linkage project - Conceiving Connections: Increasing industry viability through analysis of audience responses to dance performance. The ARC funding amounts to $432,000 over three years. The research team consists of Prof S McKechnie, Mr RM Grove, Dr CJ Stevens, Dr S Malloch and Mr D Price. Industry partners include Australian Dance Council - Ausdance Inc, Australia Council and The Choreographic Centre.

Project Summary
The development of audiences is identified by the Australian dance industry as vital to the future of the sector. The current project will investigate how audiences respond to highly evolved dance works. It will explore the kinds of meaning communicated by such works, and the value assigned to them by tutored and untutored audiences. Methods for enhancing audience engagement will be tested through studies in both metropolitan and regional centres. Dance scholars, artists and cognitive psychologists collaborate with three industry partners to identify and address significant concerns for artists, presenters, advocates and funding bodies, and to train postgraduate researchers in inter-disciplinary modes. Congratulations to the research team; it is a great achievement for the VCA and the School of Dance. The research promises to be of real significance for the development of audiences for dance.

Conceiving Connections
The new dance research project funded by the Australian Research Council for 2002-2004 is now ready to undertake its first investigations into audience development for contemporary dance. Professor Shirley McKechnie, as the VCA's Chief Investigator, leads the research team for Conceiving Connections. Industry partners, dance artists and researchers will focus in 2002 on performances in Melbourne and in two regional areas. The Geelong Performing Arts Centre and Arts Swan Hill will be the first to host the program. Colleagues at the Macarthur Research Centre, University of Western Sydney are currently working on the 'Audience Research Tool' (ART) which will form the basis of the first investigations.

Unspoken Knowledges – Past Research
The Unspoken Knowledges research project funded by the Australian Research Council in 1999 is now in its final stages. By exploring the kinds of creative thought involved in choreography, the three-year project, under the leadership of Shirley McKechnie in the School of Dance, has revealed and studied the processes involved in the creation of several choreographic works. The research team has now been able to claim choreographic cognition as a new field of study. Two major works conceived and created by Dance staff member, choreographer Anna Smith, have been central to the investigation. They have been documented in close detail and their publication as performance in the Gasworks Theatre is testimony to the talent and resourcefulness of Anna and her dancers, among them staff member, Meredith Blackburn. One of the works, Red Rain, received the prestigious Green Room Award for original choreography in 1999. The second work, Quiescence, completed in 2001, makes reference to the stillness of time and the relentless aging process of mortal and matter. The work employs Judith Wright's poem Gum Trees Stripping as a point of departure. The analogy between the bark of a tree and human skin evokes two kinds of temporal reality. The work is currently the subject of a joint project between the choreographer and David Price in the School of Film and Television. Using the technology acquired through the ARC's RIEF grant, David and Anna are collaborating in a very different version of the work in which the visual imagery of the sub-text will also be revealed.

Creating and integrating representations of one's self: an investigation of the potential of multi-modal arts based expressive practices in the rehabilitation of the mentally ill
A pilot research project is currently exploring the capacity of creative artistic practices to contribute to personal understanding and development of self-esteem and communicating abilities. This project is a partnership initiative between Inner West Community Care Unit (NTCCU), The Inner West Mobile Support Team (IWMST), the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and The Melbourne Institute of Creative Arts Therapies (MIECAT). The target group comprises eight people between the ages of 20 and 50 from IWCCU and IWMST. They come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds including Anglo-Saxon. The participants suffer from severe mental illness coupled with an ongoing experience of a cycle of economic and social disadvantage. Some with promising academic achievements and career paths have had their goals prematurely shattered and ties with family and peer groups broken. This continues to have a devastating impact on their self-esteem and ability to have a meaningful and happy life. The cycle of disempowerment is compounded by internalised stigma. Arts Therapy within the context of a supportive peer group has great potential to help these people break this cycle and to establish/re-establish connections with their community.

Personal meanings and artistic processes: a study of multi-modal improvisation
Abstract: This study illuminates the experience of improvisation across modes of artistic forming. It examines the perceptions of a number of artists, including the researcher, who participated over an extended period in a series of multi-modal improvisations and related artistic constructions. Experiential phenomenology, heuristics, and hermeneutics inform the research methodology. The study explores ways of describing the inner experience of artistic making in the context of individual and collaborative processes involving movement, sound, forms of writing, speech and the medium of film.

Significant life experiences and their manifestation in artistic work: representations of the distant past
This inquiry asks how might artistic representations be reflective of significant events in a person's lived experience. Kuspit (1995) in his investigation of 'idiosyncratic identities' draws out a number of themes in an artist's work. He relates these to particular events or circumstances in the life world of his case studies. This study will employ a qualitative approach to explore the creative work of both funded and non-funded 'artists' across a spectrum of ages. It is a project still in its development phase.

Kuspit, D 1995, Idiosyncratic identities, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Don Asker's website: http://janemortiss.customer.netspace.net.au/