“Contemporary dance has allowed me to step outside the shackles of ballet which were created by white men in the 1800s.” HELEN MUSA meets former ballet dancer Mia Rashid.

Always close to International Dance Day on April 29, Canberra Dance Week serves to turn the spotlight on our local dance scene, with an impressive range of events.

This year they include Loitering & Leaping in the National Library of Australia for older Canberrans, a burlesque workshop series with the Menagerie of Misfits instructors, Australian Dance Party professional classes, a contact improvisation event with Debora Di Centa and a dance film workshop for schools with Peng Hsiao-yin from Taiwan. They’re just the tip of the iceberg. 

What is even more impressive is that every year Dance Week turns up talent in the nation’s capital which may have passed unnoticed.

One such is classically-trained dancer Mia Rashid, who will perform her own creation, Rond-De-Jambe (meaning circle of the leg) in Ainslie Place, Civic, near the fountain outside the Canberra Centre.

Rashid, a student development studies and arts at the ANU, is also a highly-trained ballet artist who has turned her focus to contemporary dance.

“I love ballet, but you don’t get to have your own ideas because you’re following a script,” she says.

“Contemporary dance has allowed me to step outside the shackles of ballet which were created by white men in the 1800s.” 

She should know. 

Born to a Bangladeshi father and a British-Australian mother, Rashid grew up in Sydney’s Rozelle, studied ballet from age four and was schooled at Newtown School of the Performing Arts from years 7-9. Then she headed for the Queensland Ballet Academy, where she studied the art form according to its strictest precepts.

During year 12 there, she was chosen to take part in a summer intensive course at the famed Joffrey Academy of Dance in Chicago, where she got to perform in Sleeping Beauty and Raymonda.

Back in Australia, Rashid looked set upon a dance career, but then, as she says, “covid struck and it all stopped, we just couldn’t do it”.

Always an able scholar, she decided she would head for what she’d heard was “a very good uni”, the ANU, and began a bachelor of development studies. 

Inevitably, after the effects of covid waned, she found herself dance-deprived, so her eyes turned northward, she took time out of her ANU studies, and headed for Europe. 

In 2022 she took part in the B12 Festival Berlin, then in 2023 studied in a Tanzfabrik Berlin workshop with Pau Aran, with Giovanni Insuado at the Advanced Dance Institute in Barcelona and in a residency at the Blivande Art with House in Stockholm.

She returned to Barcelona in 2024 before repatriating to work with Maxine Doyle and Gabrielle Nankivell at Form Dance Projects in Sydney.

In February this year, with Operantics in Sydney, she performed a double bill featuring Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins at the Mosman Art Gallery but now, resuming the degree at her chosen university, Rashid is enjoying the best of both worlds, combining research and dance.

She’s been taking inspirational three-hour immersion classes with Alison Plevey and Sara Black at the Australian Dance Party and has more recently met Cathy Adamek, the head of Ausdance ACT.

Together with composer Marlēné Claudine Radice, theatre artist Piumi Wijesundara and UC robotics engineer Maleen Jayasuriya, she’s been in two experimental films that involve dancing with a UR10 robot.

During Dance Week the public won’t be treated to anything quite so radical.

Rond-De-Jambe, Rashid explains, is a common practice-move in ballet and her free, public, contemporary dance performance of the same name incorporates circular movements of the leg while attempting to cross the boundaries between ballet and other kinds of dance. 

“Ballet is a restrictive form so I’d like to say I’m trying to exceed what’s done in ballet.”

And, yes, she is pretty confident that she’ll be experiencing many, many scratches and bruises.

Rond-De-Jambe by Mia Rashid, Ainslie Place City Walk, May 2-3. Australian Dance Week, until May 5.