Canberra-based youth dance company QL2. Photo credit: Lorna Sim.
The youth dance sector may lack the profile of Australia’s youth circus and theatre sectors but it certainly doesn’t lack ambition, according to Alice Lee Holland, Artistic Director of the Australian Youth Dance Festival (AYDF).
‘I think it’s still finding its feet,’ she said of the sector. Despite the hard work of many dedicated youth dance companies and individuals who are doing ‘an incredible job’, Holland emphasised, the sector as a whole is ‘not very good at telling our own story. It’s a bit of a silent artform traditionally.’