Face to Face: Making Dance and Theatre in Community: Making Dance & Theatre in Community [Paperback] Fisher Judi and Shelton Beth

Judi was the PCLC’s director from 1995 to 1999. During her five-year tenure, she initiated the centre’s Community Performance Making Program, which was originally known as the Artist-in-Residence Program. She obtained funding for three artist-in-residence projects, for which her responsibilities were supervision and accountability. In 2000, Judi secured funding for this performing-arts publication project, Face to Face, through the Community Cultural Development Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. Since August 2000, she’s been promotions and publications officer for the regional Victorian organisation Women’s Health, Goulburn North-East. Judi’s interest in nurturing visual and performing artists emerged between 1985 and 1989, when she was chaplain at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). In 1993, she documented a unique arts project, in which the Uniting Church in Australia commissioned some local painters to create contemporary and inclusive images based on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. With Janet Wood, she co-authored A Place at the Table: Women at the Last Supper, which was published by the Australian Christian Literature Society and was a finalist in the 1994 Book of the Year Awards. At present, the book is out of print, but it was well received in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Judi’s first career was in teaching, in Papua New Guinea, the United States and Vanuatu. She continues to have wide-ranging career interests and to participate in community forums. Between 1981 and 1985, she was national officer of the Women and Development Network in Australia, and she’s been an editorial-board member for the youth magazine A.D. In 1986–87, she was a founding officer and editor of the Tertiary Campus Ministry Association of Australia, and in 1998–99, she was a community-agency member of the City of Darebin’s Safer Communities Steering Committee. Beth is a well-known choreographer and community artist. In 1983, she co-founded the Danceworks Dance Company, and from 1989 to 1991, she was the company’s co-artistic director. Beth was the key artist for the PCLC’s 1996 project Once Upon Your Birthday. Audiences throughout Australia and New Zealand have viewed Beth’s choreography as staged by dance companies as well as in theatres and community-performance projects. Her works include One Meets Two Parts, Tide and Common Touch, for Danceworks, and Groundswell and Time Present, for Tasdance. Her large-scale community-performance projects include Going Dancing, in 1986; Dance on Darwin, in 1989; Wings of Summer, in 1990 and ’91; and Once Upon Your Birthday, in 1996. She’s often worked in Darwin, with the Tracks dance troupe, most recently in 1998, on The Land, the Cross and the Lotus. From 1993 to 1996, she chaired the Dance Advisory Panel of the Victorian Ministry of the Arts. Beth has written about community dance, in the books If You Can Move You Can Dance, published in 1994, and Dancers and Communities, published in 1997. She’s been a committee member of three dance enterprises: Ausdance Victoria, Napier Street Theatre, and Community Music Victoria. With the director Tim Newth, she directed a 100-dancer performance on Queensland’s Magnetic Island, for the Ausdance National Youth Dance Festival, and co-facilitated Moving On 2000, the first national gathering of community-dance workers. Beth continues to use her choreography, community-performance work and teaching to reflect her interest in artistic expression, and is studying Honours in Psychology, at Melbourne’s Swinburne University.