Dance and postcolonialism in Mardi McConnochie's The Snow Queen

Dance, and particularly professional dance, has received little attention in Australian fiction and even less in critical studies. Mardi McConnochie's The Snow Queen charts the life of three dancers, Galina Koslova, Edward Larwood (Teddy) and Posy Foster, working professionally as performers and choreographers in Australia. The narrative centres on Galina's attempts to establish an Australian ballet company in the 1940s. Using first- and third-person narrative, it shifts between this time and the present of the novel 1973, when Galina is writing her memoir. The thirty-year span of the novel reveals the persistence of the 'cultural cringe' in Australia's artistic environment, alongside the movement away from a homogenous national identity to one embracing multiplicity and uncertainty. These themes emerge most clearly in the dancing moments presented: through the style of dance, the narratives depicted in movement, and an examination of what the characters dance and choreograph. In the 1940s the characters stand destructively opposed to each other's individual endeavours in dance, but in 1973, under different conditions, creative collaboration is possible.