Margaret Barr (choreographer)

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Margaret Barr (29 November 1904 – 29 May 1991) was an Australian choreographer and teacher who created more than eighty dance-dramas over about sixty years. She worked in the United States, England, New Zealand and Australia.

Barr was born in Bombay, India, and grew up in the United States and England. She studied dance with Martha Graham in New York and then moved to London, where she formed dance groups, taught at Dartington Hall School in Devon, and began making dance-dramas about contemporary topics. She preferred large groups and simple scenery, and she later coined the term “dance-drama.”

In 1936 she married Douglas Hart, a pacifist. Because of his views, they moved to New Zealand in 1939 to avoid military service. There she taught movement and improvisation and created works with poet R. A. Mason, including China (1943) and Refugee (1945). Processions (1943) was another notable piece from this period.

Around 1950 Barr moved to Sydney, Australia. She started the Sydney Dance-Drama Group (later the Margaret Barr Dance-Drama Group) and produced major works almost every year for decades. She also taught movement and improvisation at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) for seventeen years starting in 1959. Her group mostly consisted of students, not professional dancers, and performances used minimal sets and props.

Barr’s work explored social issues such as the environment, relationships between peoples, strong women, pacifism, and ideas from literature and art. In the late 1950s she began adding spoken words to some pieces, creating a vocal and visual partnership.

Her influence on Australian dance is remembered through a centenary celebration in 2004 and a 2007 documentary about her Hebridean Suite. Margaret Barr died in Sydney in 1991.