Dance graduate heads north

Having completed his bachelor of dance at AC Arts, Thomas Greenfield has his sights set further north to take up a contract with Dancenorth, a leading, experimental dance theatre company based in Townsville.

His appointment is all the more impressive when you consider he took his first formal dance class just six months before he auditioned for AC Arts. That was his first ever audition. He secured the job with Dancenorth after his second.

The move to Queensland follows a relatively short but successful education in dance.

While he enjoyed dancing socially while he was growing up, Greenfield didn’t take any formal lessons until he was 20. After visiting a friend in Japan, who was studying ballet, he took an interest in pursuing dance as more than a recreational pursuit.

“The concept of full-time dance training at university level had never crossed my mind but I came back to Australia and watched some professional dance productions in the Adelaide Festival and, I thought ‘I think I can do that. I feel if I devote myself to that I can do it’.”

It was then that he took some preliminary dance classes and made some contacts within the Adelaide dance community. Aidan Munn, former ADT and Leigh Warren Dancer, encouraged Greenfield to pursue dance during his early lessons.

“When you’re 20, 21 and you’re having ballet classes with 12-year-old girls, getting hounded by a teacher who’s crazy, you ask ‘Why do I want to do this?’

“But then you have a teacher like Aidan, who’s contemporary, and it’s like— ‘That’s why… because there are incredible people in the art form.”

After auditioning at AC Arts, QUT and Victoria College of the Arts, he was offered places in SA and QLD. He took the Adelaide option to stay close to home, reasoning that if he went to Queensland and had an injury, he’d have no support network to fall back on.

By the end of his first year at AC Arts, he was working with ADT, thanks in part to another fortuitous Adelaide connection.

“I met Larissa [McGowan, ADT dancer and assistant choreographer] at Worldsend through another dancing mate and we just kicked it off.

“And then Larissa would always come and eat at the Japanese restaurant I worked at and one shift she said ‘Tom, I was thinking about you. You’re the only male in Adelaide that can do a full presage and I want that in my piece. Come down to the studio and try out.’”

ADT offered Greenfield a place in its admissions season, giving him the opportunity to perform locally during his first year of study. He has since accepted invitations to train with ADT whenever he’s been free, spending most of his holidays on secondment with the company. It’s been an opportunity Greenfield describes as “huge”.

Greenfield says he has taken every opportunity to perform and has also done a lot of networking since beginning study at AC Arts. This, he says, has resulted in a lot of invitations to train or perform with various outfits, including a season in Scandalous, with Aidan Munn, for this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival.

Greenfield is glad he made the decision to study in Adelaide. Having taken classes and seeing shows at other dance schools, he says the way the program is run at AC Arts is superior, citing his recent graduate show Stink Box Blabber Mouth as evidence.

The show was a full-length performance whose season included five evening performances and two matinees, plus runs on non-performing days.

“In one week, we performed 11 times. QUT’s grad show was, I think, for three nights. So their third-years only performed for three nights as part of a triple bill. And they were only 15−20-minute pieces.

With his degree complete, Greenfield hopes to use the opportunity with Dancenorth to continue his education and become established as an Australian dancer before hopefully getting work with a larger company.

“I’d love to be able to get established in Australia and then be able to work internationally and, through that, create a professional performing career that could lead into developing my own work.”

He’s certainly come a long way in a short time, from not knowing much about contemporary dance at all, to a year later working with Australia's leading company, to also knowing and being friends with the whole Adelaide dance community.

Greenfield acknowledges the uniquely Adelaide-ness off the whole experience and doesn’t rule out a return to AC Arts a few years down the track as a lecturer.

“In that way you can pass on the 10-15 years of knowledge you’ve obtained as a professional performer while continuing to dance; not retiring but still teaching class every day.”

With dance experiencing a bit of a renaissance in popular culture with TV shows on almost every network and a thriving arts scene in Adelaide and the rest of Australia, Greenfield should have no trouble finding his feet, so to speak.

TAFE SA and AC Arts will keep an eye on how his career progresses.