1992, and Donna Wijngaart and I decided to make our first dance video. Of course neither of us knew much about making a video, but that would never stop us. I was studying dance on film and Donna was studying sculpture/performance. Anyway, we decided to collaborate. This work was to become the practical exploration for a paper I was writing where I proposed that to effectively make dance films, the choreographer had to understand and make major directorial and design decisions. If not, the work likely lacked coherence in its resolution of dance, design and film media.

I am really proud of this work. Donna did enter it in one of the Metro award seasons and won. But beyond that it wasn’t half bad for our first attempt, and spurred us both on to make other films.

We had plenty of other people contributing – Chris, Lara, Tasha and Danielle were all there and never forgetting Daniel La Forest who did the edit for us in my loungeroom, overnight, so that we could meet our respective assignment deadlines. Daniel also then set us up with our own analogue video editing equipment which provided many hours of fun, frustration and exhaustion.

We learnt a lot about what not to do in using effects on film, but it was pre-digital, so it was timely.