About
Michelle Potter is a dance writer, historian and curator with a doctorate in Art History and Dance History from the Australian National University. She is based in Canberra, Australia. Read more about Michelle here. Discover more on Trove and on the Australian Dance Awards site under Services to Dance and Outstanding achievement in dance on film. Her current major project is research for a book about designer Kristian Fredrikson. She is the recipient of a 2012 Scholars and Artists in Residence (SAR) Fellowship at the National Film and Sound Archive to examine Fredrikson’s film commissions.
This website is a space for publishing her writing and for providing news about her other dance projects, past, present and future. The site has been selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia and is scheduled to be re-archived regularly. It was first archived on 1 September 2009 and this and further archived versions can be viewed on PANDORA.
Michelle Potter: Photo by Loui Seselja, 2006
About the ‘logo’ image
The photo used as the ‘logo’ image on this website is of Hilary Napier of the Bodenwieser Ballet. It is part of a series relating to a dance called Sea study and was taken around 1947 probably in the sand hills at Palm Beach, Sydney.
The photographer, Margaret Michaelis (1902-1985), began her career in Vienna and Berlin. Fleeing the Hitler regime she eventually came to Australia in 1939. In writing about Michaelis’ engagement with Gertrud Bodenwieser and her dancers, her biographer, Helen Ennis, notes that Michaelis ‘emphasised the dancers’ physicality … choosing to picture them in mid-action rather than in stereotypical static poses’. Compared with the dance photography of her contemporaries, Michaelis’ shots were, Ennis remarks, ‘more dynamic, earthier and less glamorous’.
Helen Ennis, Margaret Michaelis: love, loss and photography (Canberra; National Gallery of Australia, 2005).
Image used with the permission of the National Library of Australia