By arts editor Helen Musa

Inspired by the strength, resilience and many facets of a diamond, Liz Lea’s new dance-cum-cabaret show, Diamonds, reflects on how we are shaped by experience, pressure and the determination to keep shining. 

It is Lea’s sparkling tribute to the beauty and resilience of ageing women.

“Loud, lively and full of laughter, it’ll crack into and through the madness of menopause and creating our futures through the magic of movement.” Lea says. 

There will be no shortage of glitz and glamour. A former showgirl, Lea has reunited with fellow hoofer Kym Degenhart and dancers from Bom Funk Dance Studio, to create what promises to be an evening of high-energy entertainment. 

Yet beneath the sequins lies a serious theme. Like her internationally touring work RED, which explored the impact of endometriosis on a dancer’s body, Diamonds confronts another unavoidable truth, that we all age.

“Fourteen years ago when I was creating my show, 120 Birds, I could dance every morning,” Lea tells me. “Then it became one day a week. I can’t move that way any more.”

The 2017 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year and recipient of an Australian Dance Award in the same year, Lea has built a career exploring movement in unexpected ways, from Indian classical dance to large-scale works inspired by birds, water and science. 

However, these days she finds herself increasingly drawn back to her showgirl roots and she is pleased to say that she can still do a full high kick. 

That showgirl background has shaped the look and feel of Diamonds. Lea has spent months collecting glittering costumes from everywhere she could find them, including a spectacular silver dress bought online, while assembling a cast of mature dancers and collaborators. 

The production has been developed with choreographers Jamie Winbank, Natalie Ayton and Tammy Gissell, plus filmmaker James Hiscutt and lighting designer Karen Norris.

Adding another contemporary dimension is Canberra hip-hop artist Citizen Kay, who is advising on music for the production.

Lea promises plenty of audience interaction, dancing, conversation and humour while tackling the subjects of menopause, ageing and creating our futures.

She believes society still tends to render older women invisible. During her research, one woman told her she had felt invisible all her life because she was a person of colour, while another confessed she rather enjoyed becoming invisible. 

Lea herself relishes disappearing into track pants while she works, but says: “Every so often I put my head above the parapet.”

In Canberra’s dance community, she sees herself primarily as a connector, not least through founding and directing the BOLD Festival, which will take place again in November, with her new show, Alte, in the line-up.

But Diamonds is a deeply personal work, the second in a planned trilogy that began with RED. It explores menopause, growing older, not having children and the social stigma and invisibility many women experience as they age.

But she is determined that audiences leave entertained rather than weighed down. The show is conceived as much as a cabaret as a dance performance, mixing movement, music, storytelling and conversation.

Lea is also keen to challenge stereotypes surrounding older dancers. Once, professional dancers were expected to retire in their late twenties, often with bodies worn out by years of punishing work. But now, after the “Safe Dance” movement emerged in 1988, performers are continuing well into later life, with pioneers such as Elizabeth Cameron Dalman still dancing into her nineties.

“I’m trying to defy the ‘crone’ image of older dancers,” Lea says. “My show is about empowerment and that governs every choice I make in relation to the audience.”

Although she says she’s trying to defy stereotyped images of older dancers, she is quick to applaud Elizabeth Cameron Dalman‘s famous role as the matriarch in Irish choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Swan Lake/Loch na hEala; she was 82 at the time.

Lea expects Diamonds to resonate well beyond women experiencing menopause and notes that there are also a lot of women who haven’t experienced menopause symptoms. Even so, she figures, partners, families and anyone curious about the realities of ageing will find something familiar in the show.

Diamonds, The Q, Queanbeyan, August 6-8.

News all day, every day at CityNewsQBN.com.au.