So you know YOU CAN DANCE
Inside the remarkable rise and rise of Daniel Riley as he takes the helm at the Australian Dance Theatre
From soccer to cricket, and all of the school team sports in between, Daniel Riley relished getting physical. As a boy, he once dreamt of pulling on a red jersey and playing for Manchester United. But he joined a tap class with his younger sister and a very different career trajectory ensued for the newest artistic director of the Australian Dance Theatre. Riley still can’t quite put his finger on why he went along – likely it was just another physical challenge.
It was his next dance class that would truly cement his future. The family lived in Canberra where Riley’s dad taught high school and Elizabeth Cameron Dalman – the founder of Australian Dance Theatre – was running classes at that school. When she heard about Riley’s first steps into dance, she suggested he sign up at youth ensemble Quantum Leap (QL2) for their Sunday morning sessions.
And that’s exactly what the 13-year-old did. “It just felt right – like I had found my people,” Riley explains as we chat between breaks in rehearsals at the ADT’s The Odeon Theatre base in Norwood, Adelaide.
“Contemporary dance seemed much more attractive and more inviting because there was no set structure. There were no rules so it was all possible. It really awakened something in me – rather than me finding it, deep down I feel like it found me.”
And so began Riley’s lifelong love with contemporary dance. There was bullying from boys at school, but it never deterred him: “I don’t remember ever having that conversation going ‘Oh, if I stop dancing, will that stop?’”
One class a week became two, and then three. “And then it turned into I was just counting down the hours of school to dance,” Riley says.
“Science, maths and English were just beyond me. The more I did it, the more I started to slowly connect to my cultural identity as well. I realised dance is important to my identity and then dance and my cultural identity became one.”
Quite apart from his links to the original founder, there was another serendipitous moment for the proud Wiradjuri man and the now 57-year-old company. Riley had an epiphany when ADT performed in his home city – that he could actually make a career from his deep passion. “I realised it didn’t just have to be a hobby, you can get paid to do this,” he says.
“It was Garry Stewart’s Bird Brain – and the physicality of that, it blew my mind.
“It was ‘Wow, that’s amazing. That’s what you call dance? That’s what I want to be doing’.” And then he saw Bangarra Dance Theatre. “It was the first time I saw my culture on stage – I saw very different ranges of skin colour on stage,” Riley recalls.
“That was a real moment. You see that on stage and see this interrogation of culture, and this celebration of culture. And it was explicit because that’s what Bangarra does.
“So those two moments changed my world.” He studied at Queensland University of Technology, and then followed a 12-year career at Bangarra, where he met and married his wife Chrissy.
During his dance career he has choreographed more than 15 works spanning many companies in Australia, as well as overseas, and also lectured in contemporary dance at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Riley took up the coveted ADT post officially this year. As the company’s sixth artistic director, he is following in the footsteps of Garry Stewart. He wasn’t daunted by stepping into the enormous shoes of Stewart and his 22 years at the helm – although he confesses he was a little incredulous when everybody kept phoning him and encouraging him to apply.
“Garry’s the master and an incredible artist and leader and choreographer, but I try to push myself back to when he started in the year 2000, and, you know, how he would have felt in those first few months,” Riley explains.
“It’s really just making it up as you go along – there’s no degree you can do, there’s not even a degree you can do for choreography.
“I’m learning to trust my instincts and to trust my gut. But also I trust I have the right people around me. So I’m not overwhelmed by it, but I’m acutely aware of the enormity of it.
“I keep saying to Elizabeth – how incredible it is, I could never have written it. I never dreamt that I would now be the current custodian.”
Cameron Dalman was one of the first people he called, after sharing his appointment news with his family.
“I remember distinctly sitting in my kitchen in Melbourne and I was like ‘Hi, Elizabeth, it’s Daniel Riley’,” he shares. “And then I paused and she said, ‘Why would you be calling me?’
“I said, ‘I’m calling to let you know that I’ve been appointed the artistic director of ADT’.”
There was another pause – this time from Cameron Dalman.
“I heard her inhale and then she said ‘Oh, Daniel, that one fills my heart. Oh, to think’.
“And then we talked about when we first met and how – as she terms it – our lives keep intersecting, not as circles but spirals.”
Riley is believed to be the first Indigenous artistic director to lead a major non-Indigenous Australian dance company.
“I make work that sits across the broad spectrum of art,” he said at the time of his appointment. “As a First Nations artist and a Wiradjuri man from western NSW, my culture and my First Nations principles are first and foremost. What I’m really looking forward to is having ADT reflect our artistic ecosystem at the moment … using multiple and diverse voices.
“We are going to carve new pathways of how we can make work that is not exclusively one or the other.”
He’s passionate about including First Nations creatives both on and off stage. ADT will also hold a free show for local First Nations communities as part of each new work, and launched that in May with Outside Within.
“For me it’s that idea of making sure that while this building is hard and old, we’re making sure that First People feel welcome here – both in the audience and on stage,” Riley says.
“It’s about trying to find ways to soften the exterior of the building and make a place where the local mob can come, be welcome and also see themselves on stage.”
This week will see the debut of Riley’s first major, full-length work for ADT, Savage. It will show at the Dunstan Playhouse, before touring to his old stomping ground in Canberra.
Savage is an exploration of power, myth and identity. The violence of forgetting. Forgetting history, story and not reconciling past injustices.
He’s nervous, but excited. “I’ve not made anything this big before,” Riley explains. “So it’s both a terrifying and exciting time. I have nothing to benchmark it against.”
Riley’s also performing as part of this work – and he confesses he was a little hesitant to mix it up with the current company of elite dancers. “I haven’t been on stage since 2018,” he says. “I look at how amazing my company is. And the incredible artists in the way they move and it’s just I’ve been off the tools for a while. But the more the work starts to settle, the more I feel
There were no rules so it was all possible … rather than me finding it, deep down I feel like it found me
like I have a place in it.”
He’s particularly grateful for associate artistic director Sarah-Jayne Howard and her exacting eyes as he’s immersed with the company.
As well as Riley, the company’s six dancers will be joined by nine graduating students from AC Arts school. In another full circle moment, when the company heads to Canberra, nine students from QL2 Dance will join.
“I’m a huge advocate for youth dance,” he says. “I’m a product of that. I know the power of opportunity, pathways and the possibility.
“So the fact I can go home to the Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country where I grew up and invite them to stand on stage with my company and with me – on the very stage that I first saw ADT – is another full circle moment.”
The company will also reconnect with Cameron Dalman, 88, having a few days of residency at her home on Lake George, just outside the capital. “I don’t know if there’ll be too much dancing – although there might be,” Riley says. “She’s still performing solos. She’s a remarkable, incredible woman.”
In another first, Riley will choreograph a work for The Australian Ballet as part of its 60th year. Identity is a double-bill of two new works: Riley’s The Hum, and Paragon by the ballet’s resident choreographer, Alice Topp.
Riley’s work will feature new music by Yorta Yorta composer Deborah Cheetham and costumes by educator and designer Annette Sax. Sax launched her clothing brand, wa~ring, this year at the Melbourne Fashion Festival and soon after that, Riley got in touch, having seen her designs on social media. He’s already used some of her designs in his debut piece – The Third – part of Outside Within at ADT.
Riley and Chrissy and their two kids Archie, 5, and Billie, 14 months, moved to Adelaide earlier this year. They’re obviously his biggest passion when he’s not rehearsing, choreographing and planning for ADT.
Cooking for his close-knit family is another joy – although he laughs as he explains Chrissy says he works better without a recipe – his constantly creative brain again preferring the path of fewer rules and restrictions.
Outside the studio, Riley rides his bike pretty much everywhere and loves a swim: “It’s all very physical pursuits again,” he smiles.
And then there’s music – he has an extensive vinyl collection, he loves the ritual and the theatre of playing a record. There’s everything from disco to R’n’B and a huge selection of Australiana – including almost all of Paul Kelly’s albums, and the late Archie Roach.
Riley joins his feet together in a precisely turned-out balletic first position – exposing two of his tattoos. It’s one of the most famous lines from Kelly, and recorded by Roach – “from little things” on one, “big things grow” on the other.
It’s not just one of his most favourite songs – he used to sing it to put Archie to sleep and while he’s outgrown lullabies now, Riley’s sure he’ll be using it for Billie soon – those lyrics are almost his life mantra.
“It’s (almost) a tieback to starting at Quantum Leap,” Riley muses. “Starting as a young boy who had no idea about his body and how to carve space and tell stories.
“And now to be leading one of the oldest dance companies in the country – the elder of the dance companies in this country – is incredibly strange.”