I recently was invited to be a tutor/choreographer for the 2009 Australian Youth Dance Festival which were held in Mandurah, Western Australia. As i am originally from Perth it was fantastic to take this opportunity to head home and work with some local and national talent. The event ran from the 12th - 18th of April 2009. Overall there were 160 participants in the festival with 8 choreographers chosen from all over Australia. It was such a pleasure for me to come to the festival and teach such inspiring and determined students who were very passionate and energetic.

Each day would begin for me with a hour and half class with 30 students, everyday would be a new bunch of students, so it was great to see how these dancers would take on my style and make it there own. The second half of the day was intense as we had 5 days to complete a 15minute dance performance with our selected groups, which I got to collaborate with other choreographers including Adam Wheeler and Daniel Daw. Adam, Dan & I got right to work with our selected group and started creating our work. The work had to be based around the idea of a road trip, camping, traveling and doing all this in a particular era. Our Era was “Present Day” which made things a lot easier for us as we could relate and get the dancers easily involved and set tasks that they could all understand.

The tricky part to all of this was the performance took place along the Mandurah boardwalk which over looks the most stunning background you could ask for. It was a very intense process getting everything ready for the performance day but it all came together and the dancers were more then ready. The greatest thing about this festival was watching the growth of the dancers from day one to the end of the week. It was such a great festival which left me very inspired and feeling really happy to be fortunate enough to be able to do what I do. A huge thank you to Claudia Alessi and the team at Ausdance WA for bringing me out to this amazing event. The next Australian Youth Dance Festival will be held in 2011 in NSW make sure you check it out.