Australia Dancing - Tankard, Meryl (1955

Tankard, Meryl (1955 - )

Lansac, Regis: Portrait of Meryl Tankard, 1984

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Meryl Tankard was born in Darwin but took her first dance lessons in Melbourne after moving there as a young child. A few years later an RAAF posting for her father took her to Penang, Malaysia, where she continued classes and where she was fascinated by a new world of colour and ceremony. After Penang the family moved to Raymond Terrace just outside Newcastle, New South Wales. Tankard took classes in Newcastle and then in Sydney before being accepted into the Australian Ballet School at the end of 1973.

Tankard began her professional career as a dancer with the Australian Ballet, which she joined at the end of 1975 and where, encouraged by the artistic director Anne Woolliams, she also choreographed her first work, Birds behind Bars for a choreographic workshop program, Dance Horizons in 1977.

Tankard's greatest early successes as a performer, however, came during the time she spent in Germany with Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal between 1978 and 1984. Tankard was a principal artist with Bausch and toured extensively with the company. She created roles in several of Bausch's best-known works, including Cafe Muller, Kontakthof, Arien, Keuschettslegende, 1980, Walzer and Bandoneon. In Germany Tankard also worked with the medium of film. In 1980 she played the leading role in Quackfurdonald Mit Lieben Gruss, which was filmed in Munich and Disneyland and screened on German television, and in 1982 she co-wrote and performed in Sydney on the Wupper, a 45 minute film that was awarded the Gold Film Band at the 1983 Berlin Film Festival.

After leaving Bausch Tankard divided her time between Australia and Europe for a number of years. In Europe she guested with Bausch's company and danced with Lindsay Kemp. In Australia she made Echo Point in 1984 and in 1986 worked on both Robyn Archer's television production of The Pack of Women and in the television serial Dancing Daze. Also in 1986 she devised and directed Travelling Light. In 1988 she created her evening-length solo work Two Feet, which marked a major turning point in the creative collaboration she had established with photographer and visual artist Regis Lansac whom she had met in the mid 1980s. Lansac created slide projections to accompany Two Feet and continued to develop this aspect of the collaboration in the ensuing years.

In 1989 Tankard was offered the directorship of a small company in Canberra, which she named the Meryl Tankard Company. Canberra provided Tankard with the opportunity to develop her own choreographic talents and to explore in depth the collaboration with Lansac. Works made in Canberra included Banshee (1989), VX18504 (1989), Nuti (1990), Kikimora (1990), Court of Flora (1990), Chants de mariage I and II (1991-1992), and Songs with Mara (1992). While working in Canberra Tankard also revived Echo Point and Two Feet, collaborated with the theatre director Pierre Bokor on Circo (1991), created choreography for Opera Australia's Death in Venice (1989) and made Sloth as part of Seven Deadly Sins, a program of seven works from seven contemporary Australian choreographers filmed by the ABC and screened in 1993.

After four years in Canberra Tankard moved to Adelaide to take on the directorship of Australian Dance Theatre. For Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre Tankard reworked some of the pieces she had made in Canberra. New works created in Adelaide included Furioso (1993), Aurora (1994), Possessed (1995), Rasa (1996), which was made in collaboration with Padma Menon, Seulle (1997) and Inuk (1997). While in Adelaide she also choreographed The Deep End (1996) for the Australian Ballet and her second work for Opera Australia, Orphee et Euridyce.

Tankard left Adelaide in 1998 and began a career as a freelance choreographer. Her commissions since then have come from a diverse range of sources. In 1998 she made Bolero for the Lyon Opera Ballet and in 2000 The Beautiful Game for Andrew Lloyd Webber. In 2002, the year in which she was the recipient of an award for lifetime achievement at the Australian Dance Awards, she and Lansac created Merrylands, a work for Netherlands Dance Theatre 3. Her Wild Swans, a joint commission from the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Opera House, premiered in Sydney on 29 April 2003. An evening length work based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy story, it had a commissioned score by Elena Kats-Chernin, costumes by Angus Strathie and visual design by Regis Lansac.

Tankard's commissions beyond the immediate dance world have included an eight minute segment, Deep Sea Dreaming, for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony, a short work for the New York jewellery house Tiffany and Company made in 2001 to showcase the history of the pearl at New York's Museum of National History, a segment for the tribute concert the Dalai Lama in Sydney in 2002, and the Disney show Tarzan on Broadway in 2006. In October 2003 an extended version of her Tiffany commission, Pearl, was shown at the thirtieth birthday celebrations of the Sydney Opera House.

During this period of independent work Tankard has also resumed her interest in film and was choreographer for Ana Kokkinos' The Book of Revelation (2006). Tankard's choreography draws on a diverse range of sources from classical ballet to steps that emerge during workshop processes. In making her work she often also engages in the kind of experimentation that asks her dancers to sing or perform acrobatic feats or move between distinctly different dance styles. She has continued to work for a variety of dance companies in Australia and overseas. In April 2004 she created @North for the Berlin Ballet as part of a double bill, called Metamorphosis with Norwegian choreographer Ingun Bjornsgaard. In September 2004 her Petrouchka received its world premiere by NDT1 in The Hague, in 2007 she showed Kaidan: a ghost story at the Sydney Festival, and in 2008 created Inuk2 for Sydney Dance Company and reworked her 1989 piece VX18504 for ATYP (Australian Theatre for Young People). The Oracle, a solo piece set to Igor Stravinksy's Rite of Spring and performed by Paul White, premiered at the Sydney Opera House in September 2009. The Oracle earned Tankard and White the 2010 Australian Dance Award for outstanding achievement in choreography and White the 2010 award for outstanding performance by a male dancer.

Bibliography:

Edited extracts from Tankard's oral history interviews for the National Library of Australia, and a list of her choreography to 1996 appear in 'Meryl Tankard: Touching the Heart' in Michelle Potter, A Passion for Dance (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1997) pp. 105-121. A discussion of Tankard's departure from Adelaide appears in Shirley McKechnie, 'Isolated and abandoned: a major voice is silenced', Brolga 9 (December 1998). For the background to Wild Swans see Michelle Potter, 'Wild Swans and the art of collaboration', in Brolga 18 (June 2003).

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