The rebellious moves of Elizabeth Cameron Dalman
Sixty years ago, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman cemented herself in Adelaide’s modern dance scene as a founder of Australian Dance Theatre. All these decades on, the “rebel of modern dance” reflects on her life on the stage.
Elizabeth Cameron Dalman sits in the shade beneath a tree in Adelaide’s southern parklands, recalling a youth dancing around Europe, discovering her life’s passion. As she tells her story, her gestures are rhythmic – almost theatrical. The natural elegance of her movements hint at a life lived on stage.
The landscape of the arts in South Australia was irrevocably altered by this force of a woman, the founder of Australian Dance Theatre who has been called the rebel of modern dance.
Elizabeth’s early dreams were rather more orthodox – she was adamant at three or four years old she’d become a classical ballet dancer, with a desire to perform in Giselle and Swan Lake.
But the mere notion of the now 91-year-old taking on a career was an early spark of rebellion. Women typically did not take on careers in the 1950s and the idea of her becoming something so impractical as an artist made her somewhat of a black sheep.
But coming from one of Adelaide’s distinguished families, Liz was always determined to forge her own path.
Growing up in Tusmore with parents Sir Keith Cameron Wilson and Elizabeth Hornabrook (nee Bonython), Liz recalls one of her earliest memories was of her father, a lawyer and parliamentarian, leaving for World War II.
“He was the only parliamentarian who went,” Liz says. “The usual thing was to stay here if you were in government, but he said we had to protect our country.”
The family didn’t see Sir Keith for three years and when he returned, Liz says he was almost unrecognisable.
“His hair had gone white and he was very depressed. He wanted to give up his profession, buy a farm and live on the land.
“But Mum was the strong one. She persuaded and helped him to go back to his legal profession.
“Eventually he did and was later elected back into government where he spent another 10 years as a federal member.”
Elizabeth with current artistic director of the Australian Dance Theatre, Daniel Riley.
Meanwhile, Liz graduated from PGC (now Seymour College) and began studying at the University of Adelaide, but didn’t complete her degree at that point because dance was too important to her.
Liz’s future in dance seemed destined to be in pointe shoes, but this course changed thanks to her first dance teacher, Nora Stewart, and her later experience of seeing José Limón, a dancer from Mexico, perform in London.
Nora taught the technique of British dancer and choreographer Margaret Morris, who was famed for a natural system of movement she established.
“I’d never seen the Margaret Morris technique in professional performances,” she says.
“It never entered my head that you could pursue a career in that style of movement.”
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In the 1950s, Liz, then in her 20s, moved to London to study. During this time, she saw Limón perform and had an epiphany that this was how she wanted to dance.
However, she won a position at the Ballet der Lage Landen in the Netherlands before returning to Australia, and once again moving to the Netherlands and then to Germany. She found the Netherlands a wonderfully progressive place, filled with jazz musicians and other international artists. Germany, however, was still recovering from the terrible war.
"The landscape of the arts in South Australia was irrevocably altered by this force of a woman"
While in Europe, she met the most important mentor of her career, Eleo Pomare.
She returned to the Netherlands with Eleo, who was setting up a dance company in Amsterdam.
Liz says those years were filled with dancing at night and taking on whichever waitressing or babysitting job she could during the day.
Eleo was a Colombian-American dancer known for his politically-charged works, informed by the Black experience. He was the son of a Haitian mother and African father.
“We’d sometimes get the bus into Essen together to go see a show or something and the looks that I got were of utter disgust for being with him.”
The Netherlands, however, was a place that nurtured Liz’s artistic development, and it was where she met her husband, Jan Dalman, whom she describes as a “beautiful Dutchman”.
Jan and Liz were together for 12 years and had a son, Andreas.
Eventually, Eleo moved back home to the United States, persuaded by writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin.
Liz and Jan came back to Australia, so she could show him where she was from.
The plan was to help Jan set up his photography business, Liz as her husband’s assistant.
“I loved photography as well and I thought I was going to be a photographer, but I couldn’t live without dance so I opened my own school.”
At that time, classical ballet and modern dance were at loggerheads and the contemporary style Liz was teaching had her labelled as a disruptor.
“They’re very profound techniques with philosophies behind them that help you dig deep inside to find your truth.”
When dancers from The Australian Ballet came to town for performances, Liz would get knocks on the door from the men asking to join her classes – in secret.
“They said, ‘You mustn’t say anything to Peggy (van Praagh, The Australian Ballet’s founding artistic director) because she’ll kick us out of the company’.
“(The establishment) called my dance ugly in the beginning but that made me more determined to keep going.”
Elizabeth dancing in Spiritual by Eleo Pomare.
Then in 1964, Liz met Leslie White, a man who had come to Australia with the Royal Ballet Company and stayed on in Adelaide.
No other ballet teachers in Adelaide were interested in what Liz was doing, but Leslie was. Together, they organised a tour of regional South Australia with students from Leslie’s academy and from Liz’s school.
“It was such a success because the repertoire was half classical and the other half modern.
“We came back and created our own company, and that’s how ADT was started.”
By mid-1965 Liz was teaching 300 students each week, and they were hungry for something new. Eventually, Leslie left to move interstate and ADT became an entirely modern dance company.
“I created many works inspired by our contemporary lives in Australia at that time and we also carried several of Eleo’s works in the repertoire.
One of Eleo’s pieces that is widely recognised as being one of his most important, performed by Liz, is Gin. Woman. Distress., depicting aspects of the life of blues singer Bessie Smith.
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Liz performed the work in New York in 1966 and toured it through Europe with ADT and continued to perform it for more than 20 years.
ADT’s first big season was in the 1966 Adelaide Festival with two weeks of packed performances, one of which was seen by a theatre group leader from Papua New Guinea, sparking a South East Asian tour.
“We went to eight countries in seven weeks and nobody got paid – all we had was a guarantee against loss. But we did have free airfare because we’d done a deal with Qantas.”
By and large, audience reaction has been beyond anything Liz could have expected and one performance in Broken Hill exemplified that.
“We arrived and we had six people in the audience – but we only had seven performers,” she says.
“I said to the dancers that there’s an unspoken law in the theatre that if there are fewer people in the audience than there are on stage, you don’t have to perform. They wanted to and we did. Twenty years later I was walking down Rundle Street and someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was Elizabeth Dalman. She said, ‘I was in the audience at Broken Hill and I’ve never forgotten that performance’. That was a highlight for me – even if it took 20 years.
“It was proof that this art that I’m so passionate about was communicating on a deep level.”
After 10 years at the helm of ADT, Liz was let go as a result of changes in governance, an event that she says nearly broke her and left her believing she never wanted to dance again.
Part of her healing process was taking her then-four-year-old son to a little Italian village, where she lived for a little over a decade.
“We stayed, month after month after month. I didn’t dance for a long time, but the children in the village begged me to teach them. Their parents had seen us dance in 1968 when ADT performed in the village. Dance never lets go of you.”
By the end of the decade-long Italian sojourn, Liz had started a youth dance company in Ventimiglia, the nearest town to the village, arranging summer performances in the piazza and in other towns along the Italian Riviera.
As idyllic as it all was, Liz was missing Australia. “I was missing the land and the smell of the gum trees and during those 10 years I was away, I realised First Nations people were getting more of a voice and I wanted to come back and help that open up.”
Liz was invited back to Australian Dance Theatre late in 2024 to be part of the process ahead of A Quiet Language, a show that will celebrate the company’s 60th anniversary. Her job was to bring historical context, as well as insight into the beginning of the company, and run the current dancers through some of the techniques and choreography from that first decade.
“I never expected to be invited back in my lifetime, so it’s really beautiful. I gave birth to ADT, with Leslie in the beginning, but I carried it forward, so it’s like a child.
“It’s had a diverse array of different artistic directors, all bringing their amazing vision and work to it, and I’ve followed it through, of course.”
Elizabeth in 1974 performing a piece she choreographed, titled Inside. Now aged 91, Elizabeth still considers dance a complete joy.
Current artistic director, Daniel Riley says he’s thrilled to continue Liz’s work of defining a uniquely Australian identity for dance. “Looking back, those early days of the company were all about people, the body, politics, voice and place,” Daniel says. “The work responded to the times – there was activist work, there was energy. Dance can be a lot of things – it’s about celebration, about energy, it can be a site of reflection, of protest, of resistance. A Quiet Language has asked our ensemble to think of all of those things and how they can translate them through their movement and their body.
“Having Elizabeth in the room to ground our conversations and explorations at the early stages of development was an incredibly special moment for me and for all of us at ADT.”
The past 30 years of Liz’s life have been spent just outside of Canberra, on 100 acres of bushland in Bungendore. Liz often shares her property, Mirramu, with visiting artists – anywhere from one or two, to 20 at a time.
“I wanted to live with other artists and create a space where they could come and shut off from the city, be in nature and be inspired to create new works,” Liz says.
Liz, a night owl, loves the tranquillity that dusk brings in her patch of the world, the sky transforming into a dome of stars.
This connection to nature has been informing Liz’s dance for years and on a trip back to Adelaide ahead of A Quiet Language, she leads the group in an exercise in the parklands.
Liz guides the breathing of a group of dancers facing each other in a circle, merging meditation with movement as she stretches skyward and then to the earth.
Having just celebrated her 91st birthday, Liz went through a period of baulking at the mention of age, to now welcoming it.
“I started to speak out about my age, because how dare people judge you for how old you are,” she reflects.
When Liz reached 60, she says she sat in front of a mirror and told herself she was ugly and couldn’t continue dancing. Then, she met Kazuo Ohno, a famous Japanese dancer who was 91 and she was transfixed by his ability to ignore age.
“Now, I say to everyone, dance is ageless.”
It helps that Liz has always – and still does – feel as though she’s been on a mission.
“Through modern dance and our philosophies, we felt we were finding our own vocabulary.
“I believed in it so much and knew deep down that it was good physically, mentally and spiritually.
“No matter how much people tried to push me away or criticise me, I pushed through. When you believe in something so strongly, even when someone says they don’t like it or it’s ugly, you don’t have to get angry.
“That’s my pathway and I go with joy and an open heart.”
A Quiet Language, presented in partnership with Adelaide Festival, is on at Odeon Theatre, Norwood, until March 7.
The article originally featured in the February 2025 SALIFE magazine.