Australia Dancing - McKechnie, Shirley (1926

McKechnie, Shirley (1926 - )

Lynkushka, Angela: Portrait of Shirley McKechnie, 1994

Shirley McKechnie was born Shirley Gorham in Melbourne, and received her early schooling at Albion State School, and Williamstown High School. Although educated for a career in science McKechnie’s training in movement and dance began at the age of four and she also took lessons in ballet with Jennie Brenan from the age of ten.

After matriculating, McKechnie worked in the research laboratories of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works while taking dance and composition classes at the Studio of Creative Dance, Melbourne, with Daisy Pirnitzer and Hanny Kolm (Exiner), both teachers being exponents of the modern European dance tradition brought to Australia by Gertrud Bodenwieser in 1939. She also danced with the performance group attached to the Studio of Creative Dance. In 1945 McKechnie began teaching dance at a small school she established with the encouragement and support of the Ferntree Gully Arts Society. She continued to teach at this school until her marriage to Ken McKechnie in 1948. After the birth of her second child, she established a second school in Beaumaris, Melbourne, in 1955. This school became the foundation for her long career as a teacher, choreographer and dance director.

In 1963 McKechnie founded the Australian Contemporary Dance Theatre, whose dancers were drawn from the older students of her school. McKechnie was the company's director and main choreographer between 1963 and 1973. During this time she choreographed a number of works for the company including Sketches on Themes of Paul Klee (1964), Earth Song (1965), Vision of Bones (1966), Sea Interludes (1966), Hymn of Jesus (1967), Of Spiralling Why (1967), The Other Generation(1968), Landscape of Dream and Memory (1970), The Finding of the Moon (1972), and Canon for Four Dancers (1973). During this period she also wrote and choreographed a lecture and performance titled The Dancer, the Dance and the Audience.

After graduating from Monash University with an honours degree in English literature in 1974 McKechnie founded and directed the first degree course in dance studies at an Australian tertiary institution at Rusden College, now Deakin University, in 1975. In her role as dance educator and advocate for the dance she was also a co-founder of the Australian Association for Dance Education (AADE), now Ausdance, founding chair of the Tertiary Dance Council of Australia and founder of the Green Mill Dance Project.

McKechnie has received numerous awards in recognition of her services to dance in Australia. They include an Order of Australia in 1987, a Kenneth Myer Medallion for the Performing Arts in 1993, the Ausdance 21 Award for outstanding and distinguished service, and two Australian Dance Awards, including that for lifetime achievement in 2001. In 1998 McKechnie was elected an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

McKechnie is currently a professorial fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, and is part of the research team for Conceiving Connections, which is a three year-study (2002-2004) which builds on the research project Unspoken Knowledges. Conceiving Connections aims to ‘increase our understanding of dance audiences by addressing problems that have been identified by the dance industry as critical to its viability among the contemporary performing arts in Australia’.

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Find more about McKechnie, Shirley in:

Internet - Google
Articles - New York Public Library Dance Collection
Pictures - Picture Australia