From my earliest encounters with Maggi, which took place some 17 years ago when I was a first-year student in her dance history classes at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, I understood that she had a brilliant mind. It was only when I began teaching that same first-year dance history unit that I appreciated just how brilliant.
Prior to handing me the first year reigns, Maggi presented me with a box of manila folders, one for every lecture. While each folder was full to bursting with photocopied articles, the actual lecture notes were… well, skeletal. A 90-minute lecture might be summarised with a mind-map sketched in fine-liner or a concise collection of dot points written neatly on the back of a recycled piece of A4.
That’s when I knew. Maggi carried those 90-minute lectures – each one delivered just once a year, mind you – in her head. Those notes were all she needed to point her to the correct compartment in her mental filing cabinet.
My own notes, by comparison, are copious… each lecture consists of a minimum of eight pages of closely-typed notes… a minimum! Once I’ve read through the notes a couple of times I’m good to go… but there’s no way I would remember the details of each lecture from year to year without them.
While I was in awe of Maggi, and remain acutely aware of the gap between her knowledge of dance history and my own, she bestowed upon me absolute trust once she had handed over those notes. Her total confidence in me helped me to believe that I really could do it. She was happy for me to experiment with different ways of doing things, encouraging me to put my own stamp on the unit.
On reflection, I shouldn’t have been surprised by this last. One of Maggi’s most valuable lessons to her students was the importance of originality. The world of academic writing is one bound by rules and regulations but Maggi made it clear to her students that it was ideas she prized above all else. She was far more interested in what we thought than how tidily we expressed those thoughts. Coming, as I did, from an academic background (I completed a BA with honours in English before deciding to study dance at WAAPA), I found her approach first daunting and then exhilarating. Maggi encouraged me to experiment with my writing, to play... especially with the reviews that were part of our assessment. As a professional writer, I still follow her advice.
One of Maggi’s innovations was the format of the review assessment. The response could take the form of a conventional review, if the student wished, but he or she could also draw a picture, make a sculpture or maybe even compose a piece of music in response to a dance work. These responses were frequently on display in Maggi’s office and I would enjoy guessing to which dance work each connected, and marvel at the creativity and ingenuity that Maggi inspired in her students.
Oh - and that office. More a cave of treasures, it was (and presumably still is, for now) packed to the rafters with artefacts – prints and postcards from galleries around the world, beautiful dance books and, of course, Maggi’s much-loved elephants, in ornamental and picture form. At its epicentre was Maggi, elegant and welcoming. I don’t think she ever shut that office unless she was leaving. If Maggi was in, the door was open.
A generation of WAAPA graduates owes its knowledge of dance history to Maggi. She mapped out our lineage, exposed us to dance from around the globe, challenged our ways of thinking about dance and gave us a sense of what is possible.
Maggi, you are held in the hearts of so many. It’s not the same without you here.