Master Murray, Lord of the Dance

Pic: by Terence Munday

The name Murray means ‘Lord’ or ‘master’ and Tasmania’s own Churchill Fellowship Award winner, Glen Murray encapsulates those meanings.

Glen boasts an impressive resume of work with The Australian Ballet and The Sydney Dance Company.

He says working with them was a great privilege.

Now it’s Glen’s turn to shine with an ensemble he conceived himself.

‘MADE – Mature Artists Dance Experience’ is a ‘contemporary dance troupe of mature adults’ that Glen founded and that has been growing quietly as he says ‘under the radar’.

For his innovative work Glen received the 2011 Churchill Fellowship, which allowed him to visit Europe and North America the following year to study ‘cultural engagement’ of mature people.

Glen’s group looks at bringing mature age dancers out of the audience as ‘consumers’ and into the broader community as creators and ‘participants.’
Glenn says that the mature age group have been largely ignored and yet, dance has many benefits for the more mature, including benefits to health and wellbeing.

Glenn says his love of dance all started for him in kindergarten when his teacher remarked to his parents that he was an impressive dancer and advised on dancing classes.

With supportive parents Glen left school in grade 9 to pursue his dancing dreams even though architecture, a field which also is involved in form, did appeal to him. But more than unmoving structure his real interest was dance and its rendering of ‘the movement of bodies in space’.

In his present project Glen will visit Austria on invitation by Liz King to prepare ‘a work for The Body Focus Group (made up of local members of the community with an age range from 40 to 77) for The Burgenländische Tanztage ‘an innovative and internationally known festival’.

The work Glen will create is entitled ‘an incomplete geopolitical examination in two parts’ and will seek to interpret by dance, countries with their names beginning with A to K.’

When Glen returns to Australia he will seek to use his experience and skills garnered at the festival to address the second part of the work and seek to interpret’ the countries from L to Z’ with his Australian team.

Glen says there is something special about leaving a piece unfinished. It gives the audience a chance to enter what Morris Gleitzman called the ‘Magic Spaces’ and enable them to bring their own experiences to engage with the work.

You can read more about Glen’s present project at

http://www.pozible.com/project/189129
Paula Xiberras