Irene Vera Young

After she returned to Australia from New York in 1932, Young ran a dance and movement school in Sydney.^[2][3] She gave modern "German dance"^[4] performances and lectures as a solo artist,^[5] and with her Motion Choir.^[6][7] Her style of dancing was likened to (or sometimes contrasted with) that of Mary Wigman.^[8] "Dance, for Miss Young, is not primarily, or necessarily, a matter of the legs," explained a 1934 reviewer, adding that in one work, "all the dancers stood rooted to the spot with widely-spread green skirts to emphasize their stationary state."^[9]

In 1934, she danced the title role in Oscar Wilde's Salome, in a production created by Raoul Cardamatis, with original music by Ramsay Pennicuick. Young "proved herself to be not only a dancer of genius, which is already well known, but an actress of marked ability," commented the report in the Australian Women's Weekly.^[10] She danced in a Doris Fitton production of George Bernard Shaw's Candida in 1937.^[11]

Young toured in Japan in 1935. She won a gold medal for her dancing at the International Dance Competition, held in conjunction with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.^[12][13] In 1941, she and Austrian dancer Gertrud Bodenwieser organized the Australian Association of the Creative Dance. She later published a guide, A System of Body Culture for Young and Old.^[1]

Irene Vera Carter married solicitor Charles Throsby Young in 1914.^[14] Their daughter, Barbara, born in 1915, danced with her mother's Motion Choir in the 1930s.^[9][15] Irene Vera Young died in 1975, aged 80 years. Her papers are in the State Library of New South Wales.^[1]