If you have checked out the Silver Artrage Festival program this year, you would have noticed an explosion of contemporary dance taking hold of Perth. And at the crux of this explosion, pirouetting at its epicentre, is Strut, a dance company who is happy to put in the hard yards in order to create a sustainable contemporary dance culture here in little old Perth. Strut’s general manager, Agnes Michelet, had a chat to OUTinPerth (she has the most delightful French accent, don’t you know) about Strut’s showcase Dyuetto.

What can you tell us about Dyuetto?
Dyuetto is a season which is the continuation of a touring exchange we initiated last year with Dancehouse, in Melbourne and the Global Japan Network which made connections with The Dance Box in Osaka, Japan. The purpose of the exchange was to start initiatives that would allow small scale works produced by independent artists to tour not just in Australia but also internationally. So we started with the idea of duets, which is the first company form you can have.

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Each partner – The Dance Box in Japan, Dancehouse in Melbourne and Strut in Perth – is responsible for choosing the duet that will be part of the season. It’s quite interesting for the hosting party in the exchange because we obviously program works that have been curated by our partners and not by ourselves. So that can be quite challenging not just for us but possibly for the audiences. Last year the exchange was presented at Dancehouse in Melbourne so this year Strut is taking responsibility for hosting the exchange. We are hopeful that in 2010 those duets will be invited by The Dance Box to appear in Japan.

There’s a lot of support behind this show, not just from the other dance companies but from local organisations such as PICA and Artrage. Would you say this support is unprecedented?I have to say that since I’ve been in Perth – which is now eight years – I’ve never seen this happening before. It’s actually a sign of how the contemporary dance scene in Perth is really getting more confident and bolder in actually creating new work, and that comes from a young generation that we’ve nurtured now for six years. These two works have benefited from Strut residencies. It just shows how with some support in an ongoing way the artists actually deliver. And it’s very important of course that the Artrage Festival is there as a producing partner. This kind of support wasn’t available five or six years ago in Perth.

Has the contemporary dance scene here in Perth become more sustainable for young dancers?
With Strut we’ve created enough activity to allow the dancers to stay because it’s one of the struggles of independent artists that they may have an idea but if the dancers keep going away they can’t work. So it’s really a sign of a healthier community where people not just stay, but they come back. If they keep receiving the support they are getting, Perth can become a really exciting place for these artists.

Dyuetto will feature ‘N_TN_GLD’ from Strut, ‘What follows the act’ from Selenographica direct from Osaka’s The Dance Box, plus ‘Lifesize’ from Dancehouse, a gritty in your face act which features nudity and sexual references. Dyuetto is not to be missed and runs from November 5 to 8 at PICA.

Scott-Patrick Mitchell