Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance)

Meet our alumni - Rachel Wisby

While studying at the VCA, I started working professionally on small projects in second year, performing with Natalie Abbott and Phillip Adams. I was also choreographing my own work for performance-making inside and outside of the University. This meant that by the time I was in third year, I was working professionally with Phillip Adams Balletlab and meeting artists in many different contexts. Being able to do that made my transition out of the University much easier. I've kept those relationships and have just performed in a collaboration between Phillip Adams, and Walter Dundervill, an artist visiting from New York.

My recent work for the Fringe festival – Please Do Not Move – supported by Temperance Hall, allowed me to facilitate a collaboration with two interior architects, Henry Pyne and Victoria Punturere. It was amazing to work across disciplines and diversify references and knowledges, and to see my work appear in two different mediums – sculpture and body.

I am also about to start a Bachelor of Chinese Medicine so that I might learn more about the concrete and immaterial body. It is of great interest to me how Eastern methodologies concerning the body may provide counterpoints to the dominant Western perspective.