WHO WE ARE
DRILL Performance is nipaluna/Hobart’s premiere youth dance company, where young people take active roles as the makers of creative work. DRILL facilitates collaborations with inspiring professional artists, providing holistic artistic skills development and creating work with young people while promoting our key pillars of access, inclusion and diversity.
As a vital contributor to the youth arts ecology, our work investigates the perspective of young artists bringing their ideas to the fore, both within our community and as a part of the broader fabric of Australian dance.
DRILL is a space where young people can dissect difficult social topics, work with a broad range of artists, all while building confidence and skills through physical training and creative interrogation, ensuring we make DRILL the safest place for the bravest work to emerge.
Annually, DRILL delivers programs for our Senior Company (age 13-25) and Junior Company (age 9-12), including classes, workshops and projects, alongside our dance-in-schools program. Our work unites and strengthens our communities through the experience of collaborative process and shared performance. Our creative works/artistic program encourages young people to tell their stories, share their values, and have an active voice through performance and physical expression. Through this approach, we support their development as the next wave of dance makers, leaders and critical thinkers whilst becoming more compassionate and resilient humans.
In 2023 we welcomed Bec Dundas as Artistic Director. Bec has significant experience as a choreographer and producer, with youth dance experience with Stompin, The Australian Dance Theatre Youth Ensemble, as well as with DRILL. Bec believes in the empowerment of youth voice and utilises her skills in mindfulness, contemporary dance technique and facilitating safe spaces to nurture young minds and bodies with a focus on respect, wellbeing, collaboration and community.
Our work unites and strengthens our communities through the experience of collaborative process and shared performance. Our artistic program encourages young people to tell their stories, share their values, and have an active voice through physical expression.
We excite our audiences by challenging the preconceptions of dance and the form it takes. Through site-specific and theatre-based performances we create immersive experiences through the lens of contemporary dance for all Tasmanians.
DRILL Performance Company Inc. is a not-for-profit incorporated association in lutruwita/Tasmania, and receives funding from Arts Tasmania and other funding bodies, as well as donations from generous supporters and individuals.
Image from AGE, 2023, by Remi Chauvin
COLLABORATION + YOUTH DANCE
Collaboration is intrinsic to DRILL pedagogy and at the centre of each of our program’s projects. Creating, within safe collaborative relationships, empowers young people to confidently develop and show their curiosities and creative ideas. This ignites strength in their physical abilities and promotes a positive relationship with their bodies. The professional creative’s role is to facilitate the devising of material with the participants and build a work that reflects the young peoples’ views and identities. By prioritising collaboration, we focus on the contributions from our young artists, whilst injecting outside curatorship that can produce a combined outcome and expose them to innovative arts practices.
Through this shared investigation, we build a company of kind, compassionate and reflective young people, placing importance on those values within each DRILL project that permeates the culture of the creative process.
DRILL’s collaborative process facilitates the learning of creative thinking and skills that are transferrable to other industries and pathways as young adults. Not just a key part of DRILL creative processes, collaboration is a strategic part of programming, connecting young people and the the broader creative arts industry nationally. The variety of lead creatives and teaching artists engaged within our programs promotes exchange in skills, voices, and values.
It provides important experiences for artists to grow within and practice the acceptance of difference through shared work towards collective goals.