PAEA LEACH

DANCER. DANCE MAKER

WRITER. MOTHER. THINKER 

Paea is a Māori / Ngati Kuri (from Northland, Aotearoa) and Australian woman artist. She has worked as a dancer/performer in Australia and Europe. She has developed a choreographic rigour and questioning and a diverse career as a dancer. She has gathered education as an Iyengar yogi along the trajectory.

As a performer she has worked for companies Chunky Move Melbourne, Australian Dance Theatre Adelaide, PVC Germany, Perth Theatre Company and most recently with EASTMAN Belgium. With them she has toured nationally and internationally. 

She has worked with independent dance and theatre makers. She has performed in Director Bagryana Popov's adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, and Studies in Being Human, Equus (the first reproduction in the Southern hemisphere) as staged by Perth Theatre Company, and within numerous small improvisation evenings. She was one of nine who re-performed Marina Abramovic's Luminosity in Sydney 2013. She has been making work since completing university. 

Paea graduated from Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) at Edith Cowan University in Perth, W.A in 1999. In 2001 she completed an Honours degree in choreography, and an Anatomy and Physiology course through Open Universities Australia in 2010. In 2017 she completed Zenthai shiatsu training in Yandina, QLD.  In 2020 she completed a Masters of Fine Arts by Research in Dance, with a full scholarship, and in 2021 began a Bachelor of Health Science/Bachelor of Applied Science - Osteopathy at RMIT in Melbourne.

She has lived in multiple cities in Australia and Europe. She has travelled to a plethora of countries including Tibet, India, Cambodia, Indonesia, Peru, Estonia. 

Her first work was white, gasping #1 in beauty (WAAPA 2002). She has continued to make work funded and unfunded since graduation. As a young dancer she was funded for an apprenticeship with Emio Greco P.C in Amsterdam and to take workshops across Europe. In Perth she showed work: Voyeur, Vibratile, Rumi project among many others as a member of the STRUT independent dance scene (2000 - 2009). 

She developed a program of solos with Dr Simon Ellis and Shannon Bott (2004- 2006) ; 4 acts of violence leading up to now and Housework. These were shown at Dancehouse Melbourne, Artrage Festival Perth and Roehampton University UK. 

Since 2009 Paea harnessed a writing as dancing & improvisation practice(s) with Perth dance artist and academic Jo Pollitt. The work situates the physicality of writing as equal to moving. It forefronts a shared accumulation and understanding of tone and urgency, while acknowledging the inescapable clashing and merging of 'life with/as art'. Together they have made six works: The distance project 2009, the economy of loss 2011, quiet beast 2010-2012, Amplified beast 2013, Divided 2013, Beast #3 2014. 

The practice of writing and responding in the slipstream of delay, her physical experience and knowledge seeking as a dancer, and a series of very serious injuries, have led Paea to a practice more fully based in writing and improvisation, kinaesthetic data collecting, yoga and attention to experiential somatic practices. Then her work as a dancer was intensely physical and sometimes dangerous. Now-with-then the interest attends to regenerative and intelligent modes of working. It is all rigorous but/and the relationship is changing. 

Most recently she created I came here to dance: notes for survival 2020, The Difficult Comedown with Alexandra Harrison for Dance Massive 2019 and Karanga, a solo show presented at TEMPO in Aotearoa, 2019. She made one and one and one for the Keir Choreographic Award 2016 with dancer Rhiannon Newton and performance poet Candy Royalle, and a site specific work the lines of birds with Melbourne based sound artists Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, presented by Chunky Move for Next Move 2014. 

Paea has taught professional classes for Chunky Move, ADT, Bangarra, in Antwerp, Berlin and Finland. She has taught sessionally at a tertiary level for more than ten years, runs workshops for community groups, as well as choreographic series, and is engaged as a mentor at times. She was the curator for First Run at Lucy Guerin inc 2016.

Paea has an ongoing commitment to process, accumulation, discourse and becoming. Her MFA thesis is titled ‘The doing of dancing: kinaesthetic attention, agency and the dancer’ (completion 2020). Her work continues in a bifurcated path: as artist (still) and training Osteopath. Her latest series of classes ‘Dance Medicine’ marked the beginning of an attempt to merge tacit knowledge with evidence based learning emergent from empirical environs.

Photograph (top) by Sarah Rowbottam, Perth, CIA Studios 2011.