The Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance was established in 2003 and honours Caroline Plummer (1978-2003).
The annual fellowship is for six months (usually February until July), and is open to community dance practitioners, teachers and researches from New Zealand and overseas who have a proposed programme of activity, or project, that furthers Caroline's belief and aspirations for community dance in New Zealand. It provides the recipient with an office/dance space and not less than the minimum salary of a fulltime University Lecturer for a six-month period.
Learn more about Caroline Plummer
See the list of all previous Caroline Plummer Fellowship recipients
The 2025 Caroline Plummer Fellow in Community Dance is Dr Carol Brown
Carol Brown
Dr Carol Brown is a renowned dancer, choreographer and artistic researcher based in Melbourne, Australia on the sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation.
She is at the forefront of pedagogy and choreographic research in site-specific dance with 40 years of engagement in environmental dance performance.
Her residency project will mark a return home for Carol, who was born and raised in South Dunedin within walking distance to St Clair beach, where she was a member of the surf life-saving club.
“I continue to be in awe of the wild surf that pounds the beach behind my mother’s home on Victoria Road, St Clair and swim there whenever I return. It brings me enormous joy, always has done,” Carol says.
Carol learnt about the power of dance to transform sensory experiences into artistic practice through her teacher, the late Shona Dunlop-MacTavish MBE, and performances with Dunedin Dance Theatre.
Her six-month residency project Saltlines for Sealion Women is a community dance centred on recovery, safety and kinship. The title pays homage to the 1939 recording of Sea Lion Woman sung by the African American Shipp Sisters from Missouri. Underscoring the project is the image of salt lines as the thread that links the ebb and flow of the tide with the monitoring of changes in sea levels.
Through the project, Carol will engage local community in dance storying inspired by the recolonisation of Otago’s coastline by pakake – one of the rarest and most endangered sealions in the world.
Another strand to the project is how women broke through barriers to be accepted as lifeguards and surfers with equal rights to the waves. The project will ask what it takes to be ‘safe and brave’ in these contexts and how might an understanding of guardianship in relation to beach safety be expanded to embrace the local sea life.
The project is intended to be accessible to all and will ask participants to define what is important for the creation of their safe space and how they practice bravery daily.
“Dance takes place in the flux of the now but draws deeply upon all that has gone before. The Fellowship comes at the right time for me to return to Ōtepoti and re-engage with the place and local communities who have given so much to my own journey as a dancer.”
An Otago alumna with a BA First Class Honours in History, Carol went on to achieve one of the first practice-led PhDs in Dance at the University of Surrey, UK, with the support of a University of Otago Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship.
Following her doctorate she was the first woman invited to be Choreographer in Residence at the renowned Palace Theatre London. There she developed her company, Carol Brown Dances with Dunedin born composer Russell Scoones. Touring internationally with the British Council and engaging in sustained collaborations, Carol has developed choreographic methodologies in dance-architecture, digital dance and place-based dance and has written extensively about this work in books and academic journals.
She has previously been a tutor in Dance at Otago’s School of Physical Education (1990-91); a lecturer in Dance and Choreography at the University of Surrey; visiting lecturer in Dance and Politics at the University of Brighton; Reader in Choreography at Roehampton University; Associate Professor in Dance and Director of Choreographic Research Aotearoa at The University of Auckland. Currently, Carol is Professor of Choreography and Head of Dance at Victoria College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.