What's in a Name

In 2005, a future collective of 8 young dancers sat around a table on plastic chairs in the corner of an indoor basketball court in Glebe, Sydney, aiming to change the world with dance. The first step, as they reasoned, was finding a name that would become them.

Agreeing on anything amongst a group of artists is difficult. Arch Dance Company, aMotion and Barebones (which incidentally was plucked from the cosmos of ideas by a collective in South Australia at nearly the same time) were all thrown from the cutting board to the floor. Two girls were keen on the idea of ‘feet’ being in the name. Then, in a moment that deserved a light bulb hovering above our heads, it was suggested, ‘dirty feet’! We all laughed because it captured a reality of our lives. 
As contemporary dancers we follow the foremothers of modern dance in discarding our ballet shoes and dancing with bare feet. Everyday after training and rehearsing we would find ourselves leaning over the bathroom sinks, washing the basketball court grime from the soles of our feet, to clean up before we went to our afternoon jobs of teaching dance, pilates or other activities. Strangely, we promptly forgot about the name, but our attention was brought back to it by one girl’s father, who found it funny and thought he would like to see a show made by ‘DirtyFeet’. And of course he would! We all migrated back towards this name and since then, the dirt has stuck. 

At this moment, who would have known that the name would come to hold so much meaning? Rather than ‘getting our hands dirty’, as dancers we ‘got our feet dirty’. It’s about getting stuck into it, being unafraid to have a go, being proactive and getting dirty from working. It represents something of dancing on the dry Australian red earth and yellow sands that gathers on the ankles and feet, and leaves footprints as a mark of the path we have chosen.

These days, we still dance bare feet in a basketball court in Glebe. And we still get our feet dirty when we dance, every time.

Written by Calista Sinclair for DirtyFeet