Meryl Tankard

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Meryl Tankard (b. 1955, Darwin, Northern Territory) is an Australian dancer and choreographer who has a wide national and international reputation.

Tankard's father served in the Royal Australian Air Force and the family moved to various bases during her early years. She was born in Darwin, but had her first dance lessons in Melbourne. Several years later the family moved to Penang, Malaysia and was influenced by Malaysia's colour and ceremony. Later, living near Newcastle, New South Wales, Tankard took classes in Newcastle and then in Sydney before entering the Australian Ballet School in 1974.

[edit] Career

Tankard's professional career began as a dancer with the Australian Ballet at the end of 1975. She also choreographed her first work, Birds behind Bars, for a choreographic workshop program, Dance Horizons, in 1977.

Tankard's early successes as a performer came when she worked in Germany with Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal between 1978 and 1984; Tankard was a principal artist and toured extensively. In 1980 she played the leading role in the movie Quackfurdonald Mit Lieben Gruss, filmed in Munich and Disneyland and screened on German television. In 1982 she co-wrote and performed in Sydney on the Wupper, a short film awarded the Gold Film Band at the 1983 Berlin Film Festival.

She then spent several years between Australia and Europe. In Europe she was a guest performer with Bausch's company partnered with Lindsay Kemp. In Australia in 1984 she made Echo Point, and in 1986 worked on both Robyn Archer's television production of The Pack of Women and in the television serial Dancing Daze, and she devised and directed Travelling Light. In 1988 she created her evening-length solo work Two Feet, which marked a major turning point in the creative collaboration she had established with photographer and visual artist Regis Lansac who created slide projections to accompany Two Feet and continued to develop this aspect of their collaboration.

In 1989 Tankard was offered the directorship of a small company in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, which she named the Meryl Tankard Company, based at the Canberra Theatre. Works in Canberra included Banshee (1989), VX18504 (1989), Nuti (1990), Kikimora (1990), Court of Flora (1990), Chants de mariage I and II (1991-1992), and Songs with Mara (1992). Tankard also revived Echo Point and Two Feet, collaborated with the theatre director Pierre Bokor on Circo (1991), created choreography for Opera Australia's Death in Venice (1989), and made Sloth as part of Seven Deadly Sins - a program by seven contemporary Australian choreographers filmed for television by the Australian Broadcasting Commissiond in 1993.

She moved to Adelaide, South Australia as Director of Australian Dance Theatre. Tankard reworked some of the pieces she had made in Canberra, but new works created in Adelaide included Furioso (1993), Aurora (1994), Possessed (1995), and Rasa (1996) made in collaboration with Padma Menon, Seulle (1997) and Inuk (1997). She also choreographed The Deep End (1996) for the Australian Ballet and Orphee et Euridyce for Opera Australia, .

Tankard left Adelaide in 1998 and began a career as a freelance choreographer. Her commissions have included: 1998 Bolero for the Lyon Opera Ballet; 2000 The Beautiful Game for Andrew Lloyd Webber; 2002 Merrylands, a work for Netherlands Dance Theatre 3; 2003 Wild Swans, a joint commission from the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Opera House, an evening length work based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy story to a commissioned score by Elena Kats-Chernin with costumes by Angus Strathie and visual design by Regis Lansac; by the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games to create Deep Sea Dreaming for the opening ceremony; by the New York jewellery house Tiffany and Co. a short work to showcase the history of the pearl, at New York's Museum of National History in 2001; the Dalai Llama and Disney for whom she choreographed Tarzan in 2006. In October 2003 her Pearl, an extended version of her Tiffany commission, was shown at the thirtieth birthday celebrations of the Sydney Opera House. In April 2004 she created a work, @North, for the Berlin Ballet as a double bill, called Metamorphosis, with Norwegian choreographer Ingun Bjornsgaard. In September 2004 her Petrouchka received its world premiere by NDT1 in The Hague.

Tankard's choreography draws from classical ballet, steps that emerge during workshop processes, experimentation including the performers singing or performing acrobatic feats, and distinctly different dance styles.