It’s that time of the year when QL2 Dance presents its annual major production in The Playhouse under a long-term deal with the Canberra Theatre Centre.

This production, aptly titled Subject To Change, will be the last for founding director Ruth Osborne, who, after 25 years is stepping down and will be replaced by Alice Lee Holland, who is producing the show.

Osborne, who first came to Canberra from Perth’s Steps Youth Dance Company to work with the Australian Choreographic Centre in the late 1990s, has long been a trailblazer in the field of youth contemporary dance, especially famous for her initiatives in opening up dance to boys, a move which has yielded many significant mainstage graduates, notably the director of the Australian Dance Theatre, Daniel Riley, who was a member of QL2 Dance in its earliest days.

She has been widely honoured. At the 2011 Australian Dance Awards, Osborne won the Award for Services to Dance. In 2017 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to research youth dance practice across the UK. Steps Youth Dance Company and in January this year, she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) in the Australia Day Honours for “services to the performing arts, especially dance”.

Subject To Change is one of those titles that opens itself up to a perplexingly broad range of interpretations. Some of the past choices for the May production at the Playhouse have been more specific— like Terra Firma and Rebel: Then.Now.When?

This time it’s a chance for Osborne to reflect in a work to be performed by 25 young dance artists from the region aged 13 to 23, alongside work by choreographers Alisdair Macindoe from Melbourne and Gabrielle Nankivell from Brisbane.

In addition, she has invited several senior company members to collaborate with her, saying, “I have been asking myself, how has my work changed over the years… what has it been about, and what is it about now? It just felt right to co-create the work with these young artists and include their reflections in the piece.”

Elaborating on the year’s theme of change, she says “We have been exploring big changes in life, which anyone can relate to, whether you are finishing primary school, heading into university or even retiring…I feel like when I look at this generation of dancers, I see everyone who came before.”

Subject to Change, at The Playhouse, May 16-18. 

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