The Grace McMillan Project
A Woman
A Vision
A Castle
the grace mcmillan project
About the project
A Dinky-Di Dance Discovery
In the summer of 1904, Grace McMillan, an Australian-born education specialist then living in Scotland, was selected to go to Sweden for a teacher-training program called Lekkursen in songs, dances, and games for young children at Sweden's renowned Nääs Slott & Slöjdseminarium (Nääs Castle and School of Crafts). Miss McMillan's book Swedish Recreative Exercises for School & Playground was a result of what she had learned in that program. This book was adopted in both the UK and the USA at the forefront of the educational folk dance movement for physical training and organised play.
For decades, Miss McMillan's story had been lost... until now.
In early 2023, dance historian Erica Nielsen Okamura came across a rare 1912 Australian edition of Miss McMillan's Swedish Recreative Exercises. Fascinated by this discovery, Erica embarked on a challenging quest to piece together Miss McMillan's life story and to determine how the Nääs dances and games were used in Australia. The Australian edition seemed out of place. Other early 20th century folk dance resources from the UK and USA did not have Australian editions. Erica had to know: Who was Grace McMillan, and why did an Australian edition of her book exist?
Biography
Erica Okamura
Erica Okamura holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance from Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona) and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Studies with Cultural Anthropology from Macalester College (St. Paul, Minnesota). In her 20s, Erica spent two years traveling across the USA to research dance communities for her book Folk Dancing (2011), part of the American Dance Floor Series by Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly Greenwood Press). Erica moved to Australia with her family in 2018. She is currently pursuing a research PhD in Creative Industries at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.
Erica's most recent dance history work focuses on early 20th century knowledge transmission pathways between North America, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. She is director of the Grace McMillan Project, about the Australian-born author of Swedish Recreative Exercises for School & Playground (1905), one of the first dance-related manuals used for physical education in English-speaking schools. Erica also organizes dance workshops and classes in regional New South Wales, Australia. In her local area, she is best known for the 2023 Albury-Wodonga Dance Exchange multicultural workshop series that brought disparate social groups together to find common ground through dance.
erica okamura's
Grace McMillan & Swedish Recreative Exercises
Erica Okamura has completed an extensively researched eBook and by clicking on the link below, you can access her discoveries.
Mary Anne's Story
Mary Anne McMillan (later Donges), born in 1904, lived with her Aunt Grace McMillan from about 1917 until 1922. She wrote about this period of her life in 1989. Whereas the eBook in the previous section offers a general sense about who Grace McMillan was, Mary Anne's story provides a more intimate portrayal of Grace over a particular span of years. Click on the link below to read her story.
Thanks to Mary Anne's children for contributing this narrative and related photographs to the project.
Grace McMillan National Launch
Click on the YouTube image below for an overview of the Grace McMillan project and its national launch in Canberra (March 2024)
Gallery
The following images represent highlights from the archival process and Grace McMillan's life story.
