| Activity | Director of the School of Dance-Mime at Dartington Jan 1930-1934. Margaret Barr spent her childhood and adolescence in India, England and the United States. Her dance career was conducted in the US, where she first began formal dance training and where she made her first piece of choreography in the 1920s; in England, notably at Dartington Hall in Devon, where she was director of the School of Dance-Mime in the 1930s; in New Zealand where she was the director of movement at the Auckland School of Drama; and in Australia from the 1950s until her death. In Sydney, where she arrived in 1952, she founded the Margaret Barr Dance-Drama Group and was the inaugural movement tutor at the National Institute of Dramatic Art.
Her choreography was motivated by strong social and political concerns and she made a number of biographical dance-dramas including works about Daisy Bates, Mahatma Gandhi, Garcia Lorca, Margaret Mead and Judith Wright.
A list of Margaret Barr's choreography from 1923 to 1990 is in: Caryll von Sturmer, Margaret Barr: Epic Individual (Sydney: L. von Sturmer, 1993), pp. 171-173.
Margaret Barr's personal manuscripts and photographs are held by the State Library of New South Wales (MLMSS 5545 )
(Source: http://www.australiadancing.org/subjects/11.html) |