Ross McCormack
Choreographer & Set Designer
A 2001 graduate of the New Zealand School of Dance, McCormack went on to work with the Douglas Wright Dance Company and the Royal New Zealand Ballet, before joining the Australian Dance Theatre in 2003 where he worked closely with Garry Stewart on the creation of several works which toured the United States and Europe.
In 2005 he won the Sir Robert Helpmann Award for this performance in the work Held, a collaboration between Australian Dance Theatre and New York Dance photographer Lois Greenfield. He then joined the famous Belgian radical dance theatre collective, les ballets C de la B, to work for director Alain Platel and performed and toured with the company for close to a decade.
Joining Australia’s Chunky Move in 2012, McCormack toured the United States and the following year he joined Melbourne-based company Lucy Guerin and Dancers to perform in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe.
He has been commissioned to choreograph numerous work for New Zealand and Australian companies, including Footnote Dance, the New Zealand School of Dance, Okareka Dance Company, Perth’s Link Dance Company and Townsville’s Dancenorth. He collaborated on Faultlines, a new dance work created in Sichuan Province of China which premiered at the 2012 Melbourne International Festival and the New Zealand Festival commissioned McCormack’s new multidisciplinary company, Muscle Mouth, to premiere AGE, a new work performed in March 2014.
In 2016 Muscle Mouth presented McCormack’s Triumphs and Other Alternatives at the Hannah Playhouse and in Tempo Dance Festival, exploring the obsessiveness and traps of the creative process and combining sculpture making with the physical performance to create “an original and visceral new style of Movement Theatre”. Also in 2016, McCormack, representing Muscle Mouth, performed a solo work The Weight of Force at the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
In 2017, McCormack and Muscle Mouth along with T.H.E Company created Borderline -a double bill work to be presented at the Esplanade Theatre in Singapore.
Ross is the recipient of the 2015 Creative New Zealand Choreographic Fellowship and a 2017 New Zealand Arts Laureate.
In 2018, Muscle Mouth premiered System and saw McCormack return to Seoul to co-create with long-time collaborator Hyo Seung to present new work inside the Best and First Festival.
2019 saw McCormack reconnect with les ballets C de la B to perform Out of Context in commemoration of ten years since Pina Bausch passed. The year also saw McCormack appear on stage in Red Leap’s theatrical adaptation of Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry, and as a choreographer premiere three new works, As It Stands for Muscle Mouth (commissioned for the Auckland Arts Festival), The Clearing for Footnote Dance Company, which toured New Zealand and Method for the Vietnamese company H2Q Art.