Raewyn Hill
Meet Raewyn Hill, the choreographer bringing her vision to Dilettante on the 16th October with dancers from Co3, and discover the influences and ideas that shape her work.
SHOP THE EDIT
Comme des Garçons Black Double Layered Blazer. Rick Owens Black Bias Skirt. Lemaire Squid Ink Shirt.
When did dance first become more than something you loved and begin to feel like the life you had to pursue?
Very young. I started ballet when I was six, and I remember skipping around the room in my ballet class thinking, this is what I am going to do for the rest of my life. My parents separated when I was eleven and my mother could no longer afford my lessons, so I negotiated a reduced rate with my teacher and found a paper round to pay for them myself. That tells me everything about who I was and what I would do for dance.
I was born in Ōamaru, New Zealand, so a life in dance wasn't something that felt obvious. At fifteen, I was accepted into the New Zealand School of Dance, and dance became the structure around which everything else was built.
Becoming a professional dancer was one expression of that, but it was never the whole of it. Dance has been the constant, where I have always gone to understand the things I couldn't understand in any other way.
How does what you wear influence the way you move, both on stage and through life?
Completely. Clothing changes your architecture.
As a dancer, you understand very quickly that what sits on the body changes the body. A long skirt changes the way you turn. A shoe changes your relationship with the floor. Something restrictive can create an entirely different physical language from something that exposes or liberates the body.
I think that is true in life as well. Clothes can be armour, identity, play, protection, confidence. I have always been interested in the tension between strength and vulnerability, and clothing can hold both.
Uma Wang Olive Velvet Kika Jacket. Jaga Olive Layla Blouse. Jaga Olive Meloni Pants.
Uma Wang Olive Leather Ballet Shoes. Jean François Mimilla White Glass Bead Choker.
What has dance allowed you to express that you have never been able to put into words?
Grief. Love. Longing. The things we carry with and for other people. The things that remain in the body long after language has failed us.
There are experiences that become smaller the moment you try to explain them. Dance allows me to leave them unresolved. It can hold contradiction without asking me to choose between one truth and another; love and anger, beauty and brutality. All those things can occupy the same body, at the same time.
Perhaps that is why my work has continually returned to questions of humanity, memory and mortality, and to the invisible threads that bind us to one another.
I have never wanted to tell an audience what to feel. I want to create a space in which something might stir; a memory, a recognition, a sensation they cannot quite name. Something that belongs entirely to them.
Was there a moment in your career when you realised amibiton had changed you?
Yes, although I think ambition has changed shape many times throughout my life. When I was younger, it was about becoming. I wanted to dance, then choreograph, then lead. There was always another horizon, another place I thought I needed to reach.
Leadership changed that. When you become responsible for a company, ambition can no longer belong only to you. I became ambitious for other people, for dancers and artists, for the organisations I was entrusted with, and for what contemporary dance could become.
But ambition has a shadow. It can convince you that exhaustion is commitment, that sacrifice is simply part of the work, and that you should keep moving long after something inside you is asking you to stop. I understand that differently now.
At this point in my life, I don't feel less ambitious. I think I am ambitious for different things: depth, work that matters, and remaining curious enough to be changed by what I don't yet know.
Marc Le Bihan Noir Tailored Jacket, Dusty Grey Tulle Skirt. Guidi 989 Back Zip Boots.
What do you notice in a dancer — or find beautiful in movement — that cannot be taught?
Presence and generosity.
You can teach technique, give dancers tools and challenge their habits. But there is something else that cannot be taught. Some dancers enter a space and you are drawn to them before they have even moved.
For me, it isn't about virtuosity, it is almost the opposite. It is the ability to be completely present without asking to be watched. The most compelling dancers don't impose themselves on the work; they allow themselves to be changed by it.
And then there is generosity. I am drawn to dancers who understand that dancing is relational. They give something away when they dance; attention, trust, vulnerability, energy and somehow that makes everyone around them more visible.
Effort. I love seeing the effort underneath something rather than having it completely disguised. The weight of a body, the breath required to continue, the tiny adjustments we make to hold ourselves or someone else upright.
A hand reaching for another hand. The moment before somebody falls. A breath you weren't supposed to see.
And often, the person I cannot take my eyes off is the one standing completely still while everything is happening around them.
You can develop many things in a dancer, but I don't think you can manufacture that.
Has your relationship with your body softened or become more complicated over the course of your career?
Both.
When you are young, particularly as a dancer, the body can feel like something you are constantly trying to perfect. There is an aesthetic you pursue, a particular idea of line, proportion, control and beauty and you can spend years measuring yourself against it.
Age has changed that relationship profoundly. My body carries more history now. It carries decades of dancing and making, injuries, motherhood, grief and life. There are things it cannot do in the way it once did, but there are things it understands now that it couldn't possibly have understood when I was younger.
I don’t think of the body simply as an instrument. I think of it as an archive. It remembers people, places, choreography, touch, loss, repetition. Sometimes I will move and something appears that I haven't consciously thought about for twenty years. The body has held onto it even when the mind hasn't.
Perhaps what has softened is the need to make the body conform to an idea of what it should be. What has become more complicated and much more interesting is discovering everything it already contains.
Uma Wang Olive Velvet Kika Jacket. Jaga Olive Layla Blouse. Jean François Mimilla White Glass Bead Choker.
Which part of directing Co3 feels most instinctive to you and which part still makes you uncomfortable?
The artistic relationships are instinctive. I understand what it is to stand in a studio without knowing the answer and to have to find one, and I love recognising something in an artist before they recognise it in themselves.
Building Co3 has meant much more than making work. It has meant building an organisation and creating pathways for artists and young people. I love holding the artistic and organisational sides together because, for me, they are not separate. The organisation exists to make the art possible.
What remains uncomfortable is the distance leadership can create. My instinct is towards connection, openness and collaboration, but leadership sometimes requires you to make decisions others may not understand, and to carry responsibility that ultimately sits with you.
I have never become entirely comfortable with that distance, and perhaps I don't want to. The day decisions that affect other people's lives become easy is probably the day I should stop leading.
What have you had to sacrifice for dance that people rarely see?
Time. That is probably the simplest answer, but it is also more than that.
There are thousands of hours nobody sees: airports, meetings, rehearsals, opening nights, touring, carrying the responsibility of an organisation home with you.
But perhaps the greater sacrifice is the parts of yourself that quietly disappear when you give so much of your life to something. The hobbies you don't develop, the friendships you don't tend to, the time alone that you keep postponing. You become incredibly good at being where you need to be and doing what needs to be done, and somewhere in that, there can be very little space left simply to be yourself.
I don't regret the life I have had in dance, but I understand its cost much more clearly now. Time feels precious to me in a way it didn't when I was younger; particularly time that doesn't need to produce anything, achieve anything or belong to anyone else.
Marc Le Bihan Noir Tailored Jacket, Dusty Grey Tulle Skirt. Guidi 989 Back Zip Boots.
Which version of yourself appears when nobody is watching?
The quiet, funny one. People probably associate me with drive. I have spent much of my life making things happen, leading, deciding and carrying responsibility. That part of me is very real, but it isn't all of me.
When nobody is watching, I think I am softer. I have a dark sense of humour, but I am also incredibly sensitive. I feel things deeply. I am vulnerable in ways that I don't always allow people to see.
When nobody is watching, perhaps I allow more of that vulnerability to exist. I don't have to be the person who knows what to do next. I can be uncertain, emotional, ridiculous, funny. Perhaps what I value isn't being alone so much as the moments when I don't have to be in charge of anything, when I don't have to have the answer, make the decision or know what happens next.
The older I become, the more I value that version of myself. Not because she is hidden, but because she doesn't have to be useful to anyone.
Is there a work you still carry in your body, long after you stopped performing it?
There are many. But strangely, what I carry isn't necessarily the choreography.
I carry flashes. Creating and teaching at Juilliard, New York. Meeting Baryshnikov. My dressing room at the Sydney Opera House, and the extraordinary feeling of standing on that stage alone before I performed my solo shows. Riding my bicycle through the streets of Tokyo in the early mornings, processing my lessons with Butoh Master Yoshito Ohno. Dancing through Akira Isogawa’s warehouse handpicking outfits for our new work together.
I can still feel particular floors beneath my feet, the weight of another person's hand, the quality of light in a theatre, the breath before walking onstage. Those things live in the body differently from the way they live in memory. I don't have to consciously recall them; sometimes they simply appear, and suddenly I am connected to another time, another place, another version of myself.
Before his passing Butoh master Yoshito Ohno gifted me his solo work FlowerBird to reimagine. The invitation was much more profound: to discover what has remained in my body from the time we spent training together and to allow that inheritance to encounter the artist I have become.
With your tenure at Co3 ending next year, what are you quietly imaging for the chapter that follows? Is there something you have never had the freedom to pursue until now?
Time is what I am imagining.
For twelve years, Co3 has occupied an enormous part of my creative and personal life. We built dancers, pathways for artists and a place for the company within Western Australia's cultural life. I am enormously proud of what we created.
However, leadership also means continually placing the needs of an organisation and other artists ahead of your own practice. So, what I am quietly imagining now is time and space, to allow my life to become wider.
Perhaps, the creation of a solo work is part of that return. I want time to research, to be in a studio without immediately needing an outcome, to encounter other artists and cultures, and to follow ideas without necessarily knowing where they will lead.
I am also curious about creativity beyond the theatre. I am in the process of creating House by Martha, where I curate, declutter and refine wardrobes and spaces in everyday homes. I think of that as choreography too, bringing together my love of fashion and design with something I care deeply about, people and community.
In my wildest dreams, I would love to become a midwife specialising in older pregnancies. Having experienced giving birth at 45, I understand intimately what it means to move through pregnancy later in life. I know the kind of care I needed: someone who could acknowledge the realities without allowing them to eclipse the extraordinary experience of becoming a mother.
No matter where this next chapter takes me, my motto is very simple: TO GO WITH CARE. To move through the world with care for the people around me, care for the work, care for myself, and care for whatever I might still become.
Photography by Tülay Dinçel.
Makeup by Ash Brockman with NARS.
Hair by Rock Paper Scissors.