A message from Temperance Hall Director William McBride
30th May, 2025
Last month, we changed our official incorporated association name from ‘BalletLab Association Inc.’ to ‘Temperance Hall Association Inc.’; this month the Board officially appointed me as Director of the new organisation, after 12 months as the only salaried employee; and we will shortly sign a new 4-year lease with our landlords Working Heritage.
These changes have come 17 long months after we announced major funding losses and the threat of closure. It has been a slow and often precarious journey to get here, aided all the while by an incredibly supportive Board and a sequence of brilliant casual employees – Artist/Producer/Venue Management ‘triple threats’. We are definitely not out of the woods yet, but…this month we have launched an EOFY fundraising campaign with the tagline ‘Reassemble Temperance Hall’ and I wanted to take the opportunity to explain what I think that means, and why I think it’s worth your investment!
Legacy
I joined Temperance Hall as Executive Producer in 2022 after having performed in two remarkable and hallucinatory BalletLab works – ‘Prelude’ (2020) and ‘Laceship’ (2021) – and having presented my own work (‘Doors Shut’ by Alice Will Caroline) at Temperance Hall in 2019.
I was drawn to the Executive role because of the artistic culture that founding Artistic Director Phillip Adams and BalletLab had established at Temperance Hall – a total reverence for artistic creation through rigorous choreographic and aesthetic craft, alongside a camp, deeply queer irreverence. Sensibleness, palatability or marketability, never intruded to hobble artistic creation – allowing each work to each find its singular, striking realisation.
Phillip’s artistic legacy at Temperance Hall cultivated a community of independent artists who were drawn to this way of working. Original, authentic voices, queer punks, people deadly serious about art, dance and performance and its capacity to mean something ultimate. In so many of the artists who develop work here, there is a love of craft, an embrace of the labour required to discover something new, and a queer sensibility that navigates a complex relationship with taboo, provocation, silliness, avant garde aesthetics, and an activism challenging social norms.
The community of practice at Temperance Hall is a remarkable legacy of BalletLab, and it is a privilege and responsibility to now seek to carry it forward in some new, different way as ‘Temperance Hall Association Inc.’
New Direction
I have been making dance and performance work in Melbourne as an independent artist for 15 years, and this is the primary experience that drives my motivations in developing programming and operational models at Temperance Hall.
As Director, I am working with the Board to create a context that:
- Centres artistic practice, and understands this as an expertise
- Emphasises dance, movement and expanded choreographic art forms
- Defers to artists as the authorities on their work and their professional needs
- Provides opportunities for artists whose work is valuable but isn’t obviously marketable and may not find support in more mainstream programming contexts
- Offers conditions of practice that are as uncomplicated as possible, with a focus on providing basic elements of space, time, money and opportunities to share with an audience.
I also want to keep using language that pushes the conversation around art making back towards the pursuits of the artists themselves, and away from a reflexive instrumentalisation of artistic practice – artistic labour – as in service to a ‘creative industries economy’ or other social policy objectives. (All art is social and ‘socially-oriented’ art practices can be amazing, providing this lens isn’t obligatory or manufactured.)
I have also often said that the building itself tells you what is best to do with it. There is a small front studio, perfect for hosting local artists in residence. There is a studio apartment, perfect for hosting visiting artists in residence. The heritage building with its cracks and gaps is filled with character and ghosts that can’t be concealed by theatre blacks and soundproof doors, so the work that is shared here must love and embrace its own cracks, gaps, character and ghosts.
It is the perfect place for artistic practice, experimentation, provocation, sublime reaching, and failure. For audiences and the community, it is an exciting place to gather for an occasion – to witness works of art while they are close to the source, as they are being developed, and before the gloss of the finished product sets in.
This work is already happening in 2025, and our new direction has already been endorsed by the Neilson Foundation, the City of Port Phillip and Creative Australia.
Need
Since the pandemic, contemporary dance in Melbourne has faced a profound loss of infrastructure, with the cancellations of Dance Massive/Frame Biennial, the Keir Choreographic Award and Next Wave as a festival, alongside our own diminishment. Arts funding opportunities for independent practice have largely stalled or gone backwards, and the ‘mid-tier’ presentation opportunities that remain are exceedingly rare, with Dancehouse and Fringe left shouldering a massive sectoral load. A handful of brilliant choreographic artists manage to operate within larger-scale festival programming with some regularity, but there is a glaring missing middle for the vast number of professional independent dance artists, from emerging to established.
Temperance Hall is vital art-form infrastructure. Its small scale and rough charm is its secret weapon. We are not big enough for box office demands to preemptively straddle the creations we support. This means we can provide cover while artists make the work they need to make – which is also the work that our audiences are most excited by. Our administrative overheads are a fragment of most arts organisations – in 2025, at a low ebb financially, we will spend nearly as much on artist fees as on operational staff.
The artists we seek to support often sit outside of mainstream programming contexts, but the works they create are an essential part of the art-form ecology; in the language of ‘creative industry’, they represent the ‘R&D’ (research and development) branch of our collective culture-building project: not every prototype makes it to market, but every prototype influences those that do.
Practice
In 2025, we are piloting the Front Studio Residency as an indicator of the future direction for Temperance Hall: six artists are given their own key for two months of exclusive, unrestricted access to the Front Studio + ad hoc access to the larger spaces; a $5000 artist fee; professional documentation; producing support; and a public outcome to share their work with audiences and the community. The emphasis is on providing substantial, funded support for practice, on the most straightforward terms possible, and with minimal administration.
In the past 12 months, we have also hosted more than a dozen ‘mini-residencies’ – week-long space grants offered on the same terms as the Front Studio Residency, but without the artist fee and production wraparounds. Later in the year we will present a new commissioning program for 3 artists to make and share new work. And it is our business as usual to support the ecology more broadly through heavily subsidised studio space for independent artists, including those developing works commissioned by major festivals and institutions including NGV, AsiaTopa, Yirramboi and Rising.
Between these programs, the spaces are in constant use by a wide variety of dance, performance, theatre, film, photographic, musical, community and visual artists, developing and showing their works.
Future
In 2026, we will establish the Apartment Studio Residency, using the on-site studio apartment, hopefully following a similar model to the Front Studio Residency. This will be an opportunity for national and international artists to bring their practices to Melbourne, and from what I understand, it will be the only live-in, on-site artist residency in Melbourne focused on dance and experimental performance.
The goal, though it will take a while to build the support, is to have both studios in constant use with funded residencies for local and visiting artists – the practices of one resident spilling over to influence and propel the practices of the other, shared with the community more broadly through showings, shows, workshops, artist talks, open studios, and more occasions to gather.
The premise is deliberately simple, but intended to be maximally effective in support of independent artist practice.
Donations have been hugely consequential to Temperance Hall remaining open in 2025, and we have channelled that support, undiluted, to independent artists. We received amazing support in the past 12 months, starting with private donors who gave to last year’s EOFY campaign, and the Neilson Foundation, whose support secured the viability of the Front Studio Residency model and anchored our successful requests for support from the City of Port Phillip, the Palais Theatre Community Fund and Creative Australia.
This EOFY, we are hoping to raise around $32,000 to:
- Embed both the Front Studio and the Apartment Studio as permanent artist residency spaces
- Cover setup costs in the Apartment Studio (flooring and furniture)
- Complete a new website – one that archives the remarkable legacy of work at Temperance Hall since 2016, and builds visibility for what’s next.
William McBride
