Re-building: Amber Haines

A dancer, choreographer, director and photographer, Amber Haines’s career has seen her work across a range of projects with many of Australia’s most acclaimed dance companies and choreographers.

Since 2014, Amber has been Associate Artistic Director at Dancenorth, a centre for contemporary dance-making, collaboration and artistic exchange in Townsville, Far North Queensland.

In this role, Amber not only creates live mainstage work and photographic imagery for the company, but also works in collaboration with the other Dancenorth directors to cultivate an inclusive, nurturing and expansively thinking company culture.

While regionally based, Dancenorth is a creative hub for many artistic voices, providing opportunities and spaces for artists to develop their professional practice and providing an environment for collaboration, dialogue and creative exchange.

“My artistic drive exists beyond the work made and ultimately resides within the relationships formed through collaboration. The rapport, the people, and the learning that happens through the journey of making is where it’s at.”

“Our vision for the future is ultimately embedded with care and love. My experience is that an arts organisation born of this ethos has a tangible impact and contributes to the arts ecology in an authentic, mindful and powerful way.”

Since joining the company, Amber and Kyle Page (her partner cum long-time collaborator and Dancenorth’s Artistic Director and Co-CEO) have co-directed numerous full-length works, including Syncing Feeling, Spectra, Rainbow Vomit, Dust and Communal Table, which have toured Australia-wide and internationally.

Many of these critically acclaimed works explore themes central to Amber’s creative practice, the natural environment and the human place in this system.

In 2015, Amber received a Cultural Trust grant to participate in the Arctic Circle Expedition, Svalbard Archipelago, Norway, and for professional development with Carte Blanche, The National Company of Contemporary Dance in Bergen, Norway. 

“As a young artist gifted the opportunity to inhabit the wondrous and isolated spaciousness of the arctic terrain for nearly four weeks, I underwent an experience that re-scaffolded my heart and mind.”

“Since that residency, I have integrated various forms of embodied practices within natural terrain during creative developments. I understand that bringing others into a physical dialogue with the natural environment not only serves the work and serves the individual wellness of people within the project, but it is in itself a form of gentle creative and personal activism.”