The Forrest Research Foundation was established in 2014 to create a world-leading collaborative centre of research and scholarship. The foundation was made possible through one of the largest-ever philanthropic donations in Australian history, by Andrew and Nicola Forrest through the Minderoo Foundation. The Forrest Research Foundation Early-career Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowships are designed to offer a new route through which to nurture the creative talents and research leadership skills of those working in the creative and performing arts sector to generate high impact outcomes and research initiatives that will result in social, cultural and health benefits to the wider community. Here we profile some of those trailblazers.

Writing as dancing

As someone well known for expressing herself through both movement and language, creative force Dr Jo Pollitt is rarely lost for words.
However the dancer, choreographer, writer, academic and dramaturg, whose work has been presented locally and internationally over the past 20 years, admits she was exactly that when told she was to become a Forrest Creative Fellow.

“It was quite funny,” she recalls. “I was at my daughter’s primary school graduation ceremony waiting for the call (from Nicola Forrest and Forrest Hall Warden Dr Paul Johnston). When it eventually came through the next morning, the line kept dropping in and out.  At one point I thought that they were ringing to tell me I wasn’t successful.”

In fact the opposite was true, and Dr Pollitt had been awarded one of the first of two Forrest Research Foundation Early-career Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowships.

“I’m absolutely thrilled, it feels like the perfect fit for me as an artist-scholar working across both Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) and the School of Education. This new Creative Fellow position is such an important recognition of the value of embodied knowledges and creative processes in re-thinking approaches to living in times of crisis.”

A graduate of John Curtain College of the Arts and WAAPA at Edith Cowan University (ECU), the prodigious interdisciplinary artist and scholar was born in Zululand and came to Australia as a five-year-old.

“Mum was a folk singer and I grew up singing, there was always music with my family,” she says. However it was at the Margaret Wake School of Dance in Katanning south-east of Perth, that Dr Pollitt found her calling, “a super love” for dance.

She auditioned for John Curtin College of the Arts where “they saw something in me, even though I was relatively late to dance compared to most people”, going on to WAAPA to complete a Bachelor of Arts in Dance in 1993.

Her work as a professional dancer and interdisciplinary artist began immediately after graduating when she was selected to two state dance companies, in WA and Tasmania. Ironically, she pinpoints being in a car accident while in Tasmania as part of Tasdance as a pivotal point of her life.

“I was a rookie dancer and very excited because we were heading off to New York on tour and literally the day before we left, we rolled the bus, and I was airlifted from the scene - it was very dramatic,” she says.

“I had a few broken bones and while I was absolutely distraught, I started helping out in the office as an assistant artistic director and I started to see the connection between studio practice, writing and thinking.”

"I had a few broken bones and while I was absolutely distraught, I started helping out in the office as an assistant artistic director and I started to see the connection between studio practice, writing and thinking."

Dr Jo Pollitt

At the age of 24, Dr Pollitt won a national grant from the Australia Council for the Arts and two years later she was appointed co-artistic director of the Hobart Fringe Festival.

Eventually her home state beckoned and at age 28, she was appointed to the board of Artrage WA where she helped to get the now hugely popular Perth Fringe Festival off the ground.

Since then she has created and co-created multiple choreographic works that have been performed at venues such as His Majesties Theatre in Perth and Judson Church in New York.

Now 47, the mother-of-three has taught improvisation to several generations of dancers at WAAPA where she’s been employed since 2001, and has added a Masters degree in Creative Arts and a PhD to her impressive repertoire, as well as publishing her debut novel The dancer in your hands in 2020.

She’s also co-founder and a director of the creative arts publication BIG Kids Magazine, which features the work of children and artists side by side, as well as co-founder of the feminist research collective The Ediths at ECU and artist-researcher with the international organisation #FEAS – Feminist Educators Against Sexism.

In 2019, she took up a three-year position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ECU’s School of Education researching expanded embodiment and children’s creative relations with climate crisis through what she describes as “feminist, artist-driven more-than-human” methods.

She’s a core member of ECU’s Centre for People, Place & Planet which was set up to address and respond to global environmental change and describes her strengths as lying in innovative mentoring and leadership, and practice-led research through performance and the creative arts.

“Writing has the same sort of energetic state as dancing,” she says passionately. “There is the anticipation, the speed, pace, attention, timing and tone. It really engages your physical imagination. It is a whole body-mind experience.”

Image: Chrissie Parrot and Jo Pollitt.

Through her fellowship, Dr Pollitt plans to bring together artists, scientists and educators to enable more nuanced and deeply felt relations with the natural world in response to environmental crises.

“Some people might ask what a dancer is doing in the School of Education but we need all hands on deck, rather than operating in silos. One thing I really am good at is bringing people together across disciplines so that from climate crisis to social justice we engage in rigorous conversations that lead to change.” 

As she writes in her book: ‘This is a dancer writing as dancing’. And one we are sure to hear a whole lot more from over the coming years.