Sally Chance is a dance artist, working at the interface between community cultural development and art form development. She has recently completed a two-year Fellowship from the Australia Council’s Dance Board, in which she explored the cultural lives of babies and very young children through dance.

As a result of her Fellowship, Sally is developing This [Baby] Life, Australia’s first performance work for audiences of babies aged 4 – 18 months to premiere as part of Come Out 2011.

Sally’s dance practice focused for many years on disability cultural activity. She was the founding Artistic Director of Restless Dance Theatre, developing and leading the company’s philosophy and practice from 1991 – 2001, directing/producing new works, devising and running workshop programs and advocating for the company and cultures of disability. During this time, she was an Asialink resident at the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad, India.

Having trained as a community dance practitioner at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, London, Sally worked for UK dance company, Ludus.  She travelled with the company to South Australia as a guest artist of Come Out ’89. Sally was the Artistic Director of three successive Come Out Festivals (2003, 2005 and 2007).

Sally curated the festival’s statewide program of in-theatre and in-schools performance works for children aged 2 – 18 and a range of educational and participatory arts projects and events by children and young people. She commissioned four new performance works for young audiences, three new short scripts and a new contemporary Indigenous performance work.

From 1999 – 2002 Sally was the Chair of the Australia Council’s Dance Board. She is currently a board member of the Community Arts Network of SA and the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust.