SCIMM Dance Company reveals bright new horizons for Melbourne's Dance Industry
Recent events have brought the viability of room for growth and innovation within Melbourne’s dance industry sharply into focus. It seems that whilst the most prominent and earliest established dance companies have successfully carved out their space within the arts world, the increasing challenges faced by new companies trying to make their mark has been largely overlooked. The disparity between the support, funding and awareness of small to mid-sized companies and the handful of relative Goliaths of the Australian dance industry has proven for many, a gap to great to bridge. With the recent closure of Melbourne City Ballet, it feels like dance is in danger of losing that which the arts thrive most on; freedom of expression, and the chance to explore creativity and push frontiers. In spite of the current landscape proving to many inhospitable, one new company has emerged with spirit and resilience, forging an ambitious new pathway that seems set to not only thrive within the current boundaries of Melbourne’s dance industry, but redefine their own new territory.
Two of a kind: SCIMM Artisitc Directors and Co-founders Scott Pokorny and Tim Barnes. Photo: Nadia Tornese
The company with so much promise is SCIMM Dance Company, an independent contemporary dance company that began in 2013, founded by Timothy Barnes and Scott Pokorny, two dancers who were themselves still exceptionally young (nineteen and twenty at the time), and mostly unfamiliar with the inner workings of a dance company when they set out. Whilst they may have lacked in entrepreneurial shrewd-ness and the customary business mindset (or any commercial ambitions, for that matter), they had something that proved far more valuable for founding a dance company from scratch: purpose. And the first-hand insight to back it up. Many a dancer has experienced the frustrating lack of opportunity for classically skilled dancers in Australia without the perfect physical requirements, or perhaps mental rigour, to pursue full-time employment in a traditional ballet company. You can spend years undertaking classical training in Australia, only to find that if you’re not aesthetically or psychologically cut out to join the ranks of The Australian Ballet, et al, there’s virtually nothing else out there that will let you put that talent to use (Sydney Dance Company is a notable exception, but what about Melbourne? Or the West?). How many dancers have gone ‘What now?’ and realised that all the skill and technical facility they had spent years developing was about to go to waste. This is a situation both Tim and Scott found themselves in after their own training finished. Scott had been born into a dance and entertainment focused family, his mother was a former dancer with the Australian Ballet and his father worked in television, so by the time he was three years old he was already in dance class. By fifteen he had moved from Sydney to Melbourne to train at the Australian Ballet School, despite some initial reservations on his mother’s part. “She actually didn’t want me to do it as a career, because she knew just how hard it was,” explains Scott, “She tried to deter me for so long. I don’t think it was really until I was about halfway through full-time that I went ‘You know, actually, I really enjoy this’.” Despite having found his calling though, something still didn’t feel quite right. “I loved doing ballet, but I just didn’t have the full mental strength for it, I think. I feel like people are either built for that world or they’re not, and I realised that I liked my freedom a little too much.” Scott credits the Australian Ballet School with giving him exceptional, but (unsurprisingly) demanding training. It wasn’t so much the physical demands that were most taxing though, the biggest challenge for Scott was the mental and emotional toll that is an inevitable part of starting a career path so young, but especially so with ballet. “That made me really strong though,” He admits. “And then after travelling and taking a bit of time to figure things out I came to contemporary, and I knew I’d found my genre of choice”.
Meanwhile, Tim was experiencing a very different upbringing, one that ultimately led to the same outcome; “I grew up on a farm in rural Victoria, there was no dancing in my background! It was footy, and tradie brothers.” Tim says with a grin. “My parents were super supportive, but it was just so unexpected.” It all began when as a youngster Tim went to watch his cousin’s end of year dance performances. Then one year the temptation became too much, and he got up and started copying the dancers from the audience: “My mum was like ‘Well maybe you would like to try ballet?’ and I thought, ‘Yeah why not’. So I went and watched a ballet class – as like a six year old – and absolutely hated it. Begged my mum to never make me do that!” Luckily that wasn’t the end of the story, there was a tap class happening next door with some boys in it, so Tim decided perhaps he’d give that a go instead. Fast forward a few months and he realised he wanted to do jazz and ballet, and everything else too: “So that was interesting. I actually didn’t get too much hassle for dancing, as a lot of people do growing up in the country, I just loved it.” At fifteen years of age Tim and Scott’s stories start to align, Tim begged his parents to let him attend full-time training, which they did. And whilst he relished it, he had a similar revelation to Scott; “I love, love, love ballet… but just in terms of a career, it wasn’t quite for me to go down that road of getting a full-time ballet contract. I just wanted to do everything.” The problem was, there wasn’t really anything, let alone ‘everything’ to do. Scott headed overseas, and Tim took a contract as a dancer on a cruise ship. Time passed, and then in 2011 the two were fortuitously introduced by a friend. When asked about meeting each other, they both look sheepishly amused. “What a story!” Says Tim with a chuckle, before Scott explains, eyes dancing, that they’d briefly dated the same boy. “I’d just finished dating him and Tim was presently dating him!” He recalls, enjoying the melodrama of it all, before Tim cuts in conspiratorially - “There was maybe just a little minute of rivalry.” Cue more laughter, “Very fleeting. And then we met over a drink at Ministry’s [Jason Coleman's Ministry of Dance] full-time graduation showcase, and we got talking and realised just how much we had in common in regards to dance.” Tim continues, “We both had similar ideas about the ballet world especially. There’s just so much talent in the ballet world. But if you’re not ideally perfect for ballet, if you don’t fit perfectly into that stream then there’s no opportunity, and no jobs. So we kind of started by just taking all of these amazing ballet dancers that didn’t go off and get contracts, and doing our own projects with them. We’d do pieces in UNDRGRND, or performances for Cecchetti Australia. Just anything, anything we could find, we’d put together a performance for it.” That matter of fact ‘we just did it’ approach is a mentality that stayed with Scott and Tim throughout the process of creating SCIMM Dance Company, and likely played a part in how far they’ve come. There were no grand plans for a bold new company to rival all others, no, SCIMM started with much more humble ambitions (at the time it seems that a company wasn’t even on the forefront of the two friends’ minds). They were just acting on a need. They saw the necessity for a new platform for technical dancers in Melbourne with talent and passion and nowhere to channel it, and they made it happen. When no one else had.
When asked when the vision for a fully-fledged company really solidified in their minds there’s a few more chuckles before Scott replies “Well it was actually one evening over a few bottles of wine…” and, as often happens throughout our conversation, they finish each others’ sentences, with Tim continuing, “We thought, then we can do our own thing and do it the way we’ve always wanted to.” Naturally, a company needs a name, and as with everything else in SCIMM’s journey, true to their word, they did it their own way. “We were like, you know what would be a cool name?” Tim says lightly, before pausing and throwing Scott a mischievous grin; “Scott and Tim together.” And they’re both in fits of laughter again. “For all this time people were so intrigued going ‘Ooh what’s that! What does it mean?’” Tim continues, “Even now we’ll tell people ‘it’s Scott and Tim put together’, and they freak out.” As entertaining as the story is, the name itself is charmingly fitting. “It’s simple, but there’s some concept of movement behind it with the ‘scimming’ imagery, which I like,” Scott remarks. “It has a nice ring to it.” Tim agrees. As intriguing as the name has been to many, it was the performances that really got people talking from the start: “We’ve discussed a lot over the years what our ‘style’ is.” Tim says thoughtfully. “We set out wanting to use our ballet backgrounds, and turn it into something new, and we’ve kind of settled on ourselves as being somewhere between contemporary and commercial ballet. It’s based in ballet, but with a whole array of other styles infused into that.” Scott nods, adding “A big thing for us was making an intentional effort to bridge the ballet, commercial and contemporary worlds. Because everything is so separated, especially in Melbourne, but we’d like to see it all under the one umbrella. That’s something we’re always working towards.” The fact that Tim and Scott were still actively engaged in the industry themselves when they formed SCIMM meant that they had all the insight and contacts they needed to bring something new to the table. They called on their commercial contacts and did what they could to bridge the gap between the usually disconnected areas of dance. “It’s things like getting someone who runs a Hip Hop company to our shows,” Tim enthuses, “And getting ballet dancers to go and explore those other genres. That’s a big part of what we do, we want all of these elements and people to be able to come together.”
Since debuting the first Platforms Youth Company show (The junior arm of the SCIMM Company) in 2015, the Directors have made it a priority to feature work by guest choreographers, across a range of backgrounds and experience levels for every season. “It’s really great for us to grow as well.” Says Tim “It’s nice having the two of us, it helps us both stay creative. But I think because we both put so much energy into SCIMM, we don’t get out and see as much of what’s going on in the rest of the world as we’d like to, so it’s good to be able to bring other choreographers in and keep the work fresh and keep us excited about work. We bring in a lot of guest teachers throughout the year too, we’ll have various people come in and take workshops with the company so they’re exposed to as much as they can be. Because the more versatile you are, the better. Especially for our company, because our brand is built on versatility. We like our choreography and our dancers to be multi-faceted.”
Another thing that sets SCIMM apart from other companies in Australia is their unwavering support of young, aspiring dancers, and the pre-professional journey. In fact it was their Youth Platforms dancers that first formalised SCIMM’s status as a company with the debut of their first show four years ago. It’s not unusual for dance companies to offer junior programmes as a means of creating additional work for their dancers as well as performance opportunities and revenue through classes. What is unusual however, is for a Youth Company to be treated with equal consequence and significance to the Professional Company, let alone to only later develop one. It’s obvious from the first moment of watching Scott and Tim with their Platforms dancers that they are as invested in each of their futures as that of SCIMM itself, and clearly the affection is mutual. SCIMM held their Youth Platforms 2019 Season ‘Within Us’ this September, and the standard of the dancers (many as young as ten years old), both in technique and stage presence exceeded that of many senior companies and professional artists. An incredible testament to the time, training and care that both Directors have put into Platforms from the very beginning, and to the kids respect for both men. And when the time did come that SCIMM was ready to launch their professional season, they already had dancers eager to get through full-time training and rejoin SCIMM as professional artists. “We’ve had Shannon [Dawes] and Kallee [Richardson] both go through our Platforms program and are now in our senior company. And then there’s Cosima, who’s currently in Platforms and is also doing an apprenticeship with the senior company this year.” Explains Tim, “We also had a girl last year as well who did the senior company apprenticeship and is now training full time at Ev & Bow with Sarah Boulter.”
SCIMM Youth Platforms dancer Cosima Torres-Sturt, performing during ‘Within Us’
It’s still early days for SCIMM Professional. 2018 was their first season, so many of those dancers they’ve been preparing for the industry with Platforms are still out in the world, finishing up training and taking their first steps as professionals, but the Directors are already getting emails from some of them, eager to return for the next round of company auditions. “It’s exciting to see that, after five years of doing this to watch them develop, go off, grow, and then come back.” Scott nods, “And it can be really hard to find talent these days that hasn’t already gone overseas. So many dancers leave Australia, or move to Sydney in order to find jobs. To find technical dancers that aren’t already under contract can be a challenge sometimes. That was sort of always in the back of our minds with doing the Youth Company first. We wanted to set it up so that some of those kids - once they’ve gone through full-time – have a job here for them at the end.” Gaining a place in a professional company isn’t the only door that that SCIMM has opened up for its dancers though, and Tim cites the bonds and connections formed amongst the company’s dancers and collaborators as truly heart-warming: “I love seeing all the different connections that are made. It’s so rewarding watching the Platforms kids looking up to our Seniors, and vice versa. Also things like – we’ve had a lot to do with Zoee Marsh, she’s a massive supporter of the company. And watching her come in and choreograph on some of our dancers, and then go on to book gigs elsewhere and employ those dancers for new jobs, it’s so wonderful watching them find more opportunities through SCIMM.”
This week will mark another milestone for SCIMM Dance Company, as they debut their second Professional Season, Aetherium, at the Lawler, Southbank Theatre. “It’s the first time we’ve had a show in the Arts Precinct in Melbourne, which is super exciting for us.” Tim declares with a smile. “It’s always been a dream of ours to have a show in that area. And this show, Aetherium, is a triple bill, which is work by Scott and I for the first and third piece, and the second piece is choreographed by Zoe Marsh.” Aetherium promises to be a bold, atmospheric ride through different genres and style (from modern ballet, to traditional contemporary and commercial contemporary, and samplings of both abstract and narrative based choreography), all with SCIMM’s trademark technical precision. And if the rehearsals are anything to go by, Aetherium will be a performance that masterfully nails the balance between artistic and conceptual integrity and mass audience appeal – “There’ll be something for everyone in there, as well as a chance for our dancers to show off their versatility.” Scott promises. Brittany Page is one of the talented company dancers who will get to put her technical training to use in this season’s work. Also a former student of the Australian Ballet School like Scott and with SCIMM since its inception, Brittany is appreciative of not only the performance opportunities Scott and Tim (or ‘the boys’ as they’re affectionately called by the company dancers) have created, but the technical quality of the movement they get to explore: “The really nice thing about SCIMM is that they’re one of the most technique-based companies in Melbourne. A lot of Melbourne work at the moment is quite physical theatre based, so you don’t get to use your body in the way you’ve trained so hard to do.” Brittany explains, “So I think it’s really nice that they let us use our bodies to the extreme, they really pull that out of us. Otherwise, a lot of contemporary work is so concept-based and physical theatre-minded that you don’t properly get to use that ballet facility. SCIMM really is a commercial ballet company, and there’s nothing else in that market in Melbourne, nothing with that technique-based focus, it’s one of a kind.” Technique has been a consistent emphasis in every show Scott and Tim have produced, but never at the expense of artistry, which can often be the casualty of form-focused work; Hara Papoulias, another of SCIMM Professional’s company members to have been with the boys from the onset says “I get excited every time we’re in rehearsals, there’s always something that I haven’t seen rehearsed. I feel like a kid in a candy store, there’s just always so much depth to their work; there’s never just one layer, every show always has endless layers. When you watch it the first time you see one level, and then when you watch it the second time you see something else entirely.”
Centre: Hara Papoulias and fellow SCIMM Company members rehearsing Aetherium
Fellow company member Jack Rowan met Scott and Tim whilst training at Ministry, studying Musical Theatre full-time. After moving from Queensland to pursue dance, he encountered the same difficulties many dancers do after graduating from full-time courses; you’ve gone from the most thorough training of your life – multiple classes, daily – to scavenging sporadic classes between auditions, rehearsals, performances or whatever else you’ve got going on, which is why he credits the weekly classes with the boys as one of the most enjoyable parts of being involved in SCIMM. “The weekly training is amazing. Once you leave whatever full-time course you’re at it costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars to keep your training up, and especially the more technical work like we do in the company, if you’re not doing that on a weekly basis you just lose it. It’s gone so fast. So every single bit of technique and ballet training I still have, I owe it all to the boys. Because they make sure we’re doing ballet classes, we’re there every week, and I get to be surrounded by an amazing group of like-minded people.” Many dancers do eventually end up quitting the industry, when the cost of keeping up regular classes after full-time becomes too hard or no longer feasible around work. The catch-22 of the situation is that dancers need to be paid to afford casual classes so they can get jobs in the first place, but so many gigs in this industry offer paltry paycheques, ‘expenses covered’, or nothing at all, that dancers are forced to get a job outside of the industry to afford the training to hopefully get a job that might pay them, only to realise there’s not enough time around a layman’s job to keep their technique up to scratch to get employed as a dancer anyway… So for a young, independent company like SCIMM, to have sought out paid jobs for its dancers long before they’d even launched a season speaks volumes for the integrity of the Directors, and yes, SCIMM’s ‘Professionals’, as the term suggests, get paid every season. “Every opportunity they get to pay their dancers and get the dancers paid work, they’re on the front of it.” Says Jack, and Brittany nods, adding “We all love it, so we’d probably do it for free (don’t tell the boys!) but getting paid for the season is so rare in Melbourne, and the fact that they make such an effort to make sure we get paid for our time is really valuable to us, and makes you feel respected as an artist.”
Six years in and Scott and Tim seem to have well and truly hit their stride with every aspect of running a company; from organising and taking weekly classes, choreographing new work, taking rehearsals and co-ordinating dancers schedules and performances – both for their Platforms dancers and the Senior Company. It must feel a little surreal at times, to look back to the two dewy-eyed young men, still newly graduated themselves, who wondered ‘Can we do this?’ and decided to find out. For Scott, this has really been the year that all the hard work they’ve put into SCIMM feels like it’s come back around. “The first couple of years we were trying to get ourselves off the ground, and we didn’t have a fully-formed concept of what SCIMM was going to become, or what we would end up with. We didn’t know whether it would work out or not. But this past year especially has been so rewarding, we’re starting to see more recognition, and the quality of dancers we have coming through the company is so strong, it’s made us lift our games too.” Last year also brought some of the most rewarding moments for the pair, with the launch of their professional company’s first season selling out. “Doing our debut professional show was a moment where we got to finally step back and go ‘We’re paying twenty professional dancers to do a show season’. That was pretty cool.” Recalls Tim. After being reminded of what a huge accomplishment it is to have created work, as well as training and classes and performance opportunities for so many dancers, and to have launched a company that offers Melbourne something not just new, but needed, he replies “It was scary to sit back and go ‘We’re in charge of all these people’. But to be able to do it last year, and pull it off… just so incredibly rewarding. I think the other moment that felt like a huge landmark for us was our launch night earlier this year.” Says Tim, as Scott nods in agreement. “Getting to have one of our long-time friends, Brodie James, who is a soloist with The Australian Ballet do our choreography and dance with our dancers – and then watching all our dancers perform with him, with such unison was so beautiful. To see someone of that calibre and our company work so perfectly together was a teary moment for me.” “It feels very surreal sometimes.” Adds Scott, “Because there’s the two of us we often get so sucked into our own point of view - you know, we’re always talking to one another…” he admits, glancing at Tim, who continues “You forget there’s an outside perspective, because we just kind of roll along and do our thing.”
It's nearly time to wrap up the conversation, Scott and Tim have rehearsals with the senior company to get back to and a show to prepare for. But having accomplished so much in an industry that’s as brutal as it is glamorous, it would be remiss of me not to ask them each for the most valuable piece of wisdom they could offer others: “I would have to say, ‘trust yourself’.” Tim says earnestly. “We started this so, so young, and along the way we’ve had so many moments of ‘Are we doing this right?’ and I think it’s only now as we’re a bit older that we’re starting to realise there is no wrong or right, it’s just about being able to trust yourself. Let yourself make decisions, let yourself make mistakes, and learn from them.” Scott speaks up to add “And don’t ever worry about what anyone else thinks. Take advice from people, but don’t ever let yourself get so caught up in others’ opinions that it starts to affect what you produce, or what you’re doing in your life. ‘Don’t look back’ is a saying I like to live by, and that definitely reminds me to do what feels right to me, and not worry about what everyone else is saying or thinking. Just stay in your lane and you’ll get there eventually.”
SCIMM Dance Company is still young, and so are its Directors, but if the current trajectory continues, SCIMM looks set to become one of Melbourne’s most notable and versatile companies, and we’re excited to join them on this journey. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of seeing SCIMM Dance Company perform, don’t miss out on their stunning new Triple Bill, Aetherium, which debuts at Southbank Theatre, the Lawler, Melbourne on November 6th, and runs until November 10th.
Keep up to date with SCIMM performances, auditions and news here: @scimmdancecompany
And visit their website www.scimmdance.com.au to book your tickets to Aetherium now.
SCIMM Dance Company is proudly sponsored by Energetiks
Article and photography by Elly Ford
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