Gene Moyle, Associate Professor of Dance: My name’s Gene Moyle, I’m the associate Professor at Dance and the Head of the Discipline here at QUT. The opportunity to actually come back, having been a QUT graduate myself and contribute to that lineage, was really, really exciting. These days, particularly, even in a performance career, artistic directors and choreographers will want you to bring your brain to work. And that’s not just about your technique. That’s about how you use your brain in actual class. We sit within the Creative Industries Faculty and we have opportunities to link into a whole range of other creative disciplines, and it’s really, really important to develop those skills alongside what you practice in the studio. Whatever skills you develop here at QUT dance, you can take them into any career. Skills that you never lose regardless of what it ends up focusing on.

For our BFA dance students, they have access to a range of practical opportunities, such as involvement in education programs and workshops, with a range of our partner organisations, such as Expressions Dance Company, Queensland Ballet as well as community teaching and choreographic events.

We have mid and end of year shows, most recently we had the Dance12, which was the culmination of four works by choreographers that we invited in to work with our students. And they included Grant McLay, who’s a developing choreographer who’s also been a sessional lecturer here at QUT, Elise May who comes from Expressions Dance Company and was voted the most outstanding female dancer in the 2012 Australia Dance Awards, and she’s also a QUT graduate. We also had Gareth Belling, who’s a quite well known emerging and established choreographer that has recently finished with Queensland Ballet. The wonderful Keith Hawley who always does fabulous pieces that really allow our students to really get out there and do some different genres.

Grant McLay, Choreographer: I choreographed a piece called conversations in movement. What it involves is this sense of, ‘if a body part could talk, how would it communicate?’. Every movement within the 20 minute virtually has some sort of conversation. It was a lovely collaboration with such inspiring young dancers. I always find it quite exciting in the sense that it’s a negotiation with yourself, and the dancers and with the context with what you’re working with. I think it’s a win-win situation.

Gene Moyle: You know with dance these days it is more expansive out than what traditionally would have been the ballet and the contemporary field. Dance is hip hop and it is all these other things.

Grant McLay: The physicality is very strong, especially in Australia here. Australia has been known to be a key ground for training excellent dancers in terms of performance. The environment that we like to create and the culture that we have at QUT dance is really about, how do we empower our students to be the best they can be and reach the goals they’ve set.

Gene Moyle: Students are working really well and have great opportunities ahead of them.