REVIEW: Stephanie Lake Company: The Chronicles
Roslyn Packer Theatre
Reviewed: Friday 17th January, 2025
Stephanie Lake’s latest choreographic work The Chronicles premiered last week at the Roslyn Packer Theatre as part of Sydney Festival. Featuring an all-star cast of twelve of Australia’s leading contemporary dance artists, a new score by experimental sound artist Robin Fox, and on-stage vocal performances from Oliver Mann and the Sydney Children's Choir, the scale of Lake’s Chronicles is grandiose. More than just a dance work, The Chronicles functions as a gesamtkunstwerk, seamlessly uniting different artistic languages - dance, sound, opera, set design, costume and lighting - with each element executed to a high caliber. Ambitious interdisciplinarity is typical of Lake’s choreographic output, but The Chronicles takes fusion one step further through it’s ‘chronicling’ of starkly different aesthetic and thematic worlds to create a real visual and experiential journey.
The work opens with dancer Ashley McLellan curled up in foetal position under a large lamp of light, writhing and unfurling like a baby chick under brooder. This short prologue then thrusts the audience into an extended high energy group section, with nonstop movement, fast repetitive beats, and interweaving solos, duos, and trios. Movement motifs drawn from social dance, latin dance, and breakdance created a sense of strange as the dancers halted choreography with moments of salsalike hip swivels or rave postures, and these fleeting reprieves from momentum demanded quick contrasts in physicality. The upstage then lit up to reveal elevated columns of grass upon which two rows of children clad in white and holding lamps were standing, shifting the mood of the work completely with haunting choral melodies. The eerie innocence of the children’s choir contrasted with the brooding tension between the dancers in the foreground, moving one-by-one in single file and contorting into momentary tableaus. Moments of stillness were juxtaposed with virtuosic partnering, such as Jack Ziesing’s baby-like rocking of fellow dancer Max Burgess before helicopter flipping them over his shoulder.
The choir leave the grass and enter the stage momentarily, before the dancers reappear wearing long flowing skirts. They begin an apocalyptic chapter of warrior-like movements, and the stage full of of billowing triangles of fabric, sharp shapes and futuristic lighting called to mind a Doctor Who Dalek attack.
Dancer Georgia Van Gils initiates the works’ final chapter by dragging a large bale of hay onto the stage by rope, instigating a sequence in which hay is strewn across the stage by the dancers, almost akin to Pina Bausch’s dirty Sacre but in a rural Australian field. The giddy merriment of the hay pillow-fight soon turns dark as Jack Ziering becomes the victim of a hay pile-on, morphing into a Grug-like mass that swirls around the stage. Ziesing’s decomposition, from man to pile of straw, offers a visual allegory for the works themes of change and life cycles, crystallised finally by an elegiac epilogue solo from Tyrel Dulvarie which sees him return to the opening scene’s embryonic form underneath the incubator lamp.
The Chronicles is a highly engaging interdisciplinary dance work on an excitingly ambitious scale. However, further to the exceptional production, Chronicles left me wondering how it is that an ensemble of independent, project-based dancers are working with a level of fitness, power, and artistry that would make any professional athlete on a full-time contract tremble in fear. The work is highly demanding, both physically and artistically, and the level of training needed to tackle such a work is no small feat. Lake’s dancers rose to the challenge and then some, making The Chronicles not just an exciting new mixed-media choreographic venture, but a testament to the level of expertise existing in Australia’s freelance dance scene.
– BELLE BEASLEY