Bay 20, Carriageworks, 5th August 2026
Creator and Choreographer: Stephanie Lake
Review by Lexy Panetta
Stephanie Lake is the master of the big picture. The titles of her former works—Colossus, The Universe Is Here, Manifesto, Chronicles—evoke something larger than life and provide a frame for the enormity of her choreographic view. Each title speaks to scale rather than character, place or plot. For VISTA, Lake offered the audience this provocation: it would be “A dance in two halves. One show, two worlds”. Her works reflect an ongoing curiosity with spectacle, transformation, expansive perceptions and subjectivities, and the latter two serve as prevalent themes in VISTA.
I find Stephanie Lake's work almost surrealist, transcendental. She allows the audience to witness her worlds without prescription—there isn’t time. While she positions the viewer to expect the dance will be about something worldly, she allows us to see the essence of these ideas but we translate them into our own abstract stories, reflecting on our own modes of perception and experience. Lake’s works suggest an evolving interest not just in what the body can do but in how it is seen and how it can be read at scale.
The title VISTA provides the impression of horizon, a vast and open space, something that evokes awe. The work offered a juxtaposed universe: introspective as much as it is otherworldly. It focuses on contrast. It offers changing landscape(s). It is in two halves, each the same but different.
The first section was stripped of colour—graphite and slate-like—with the dancers dressed in cool, grey-toned mesh spanning from black through to dark then light grey. Costumes, designed by Melbourne-based label Alpha 60, gave each of the six dancers individual variation in tone but a uniformed cohesion in their trousers and tops. The curtain tabs were drawn in, hinting at something insular within the blacked-out walls of Bay 20, the space created reading a container or a vacuum. The lighting design by Bosco Shaw illuminated this containment with the white stark shafts that cordoned off the dancers in the centre of the space. Theselights then carved up that space into sharp blocks or circles that isolated the dancers from one other. The six dancers—Rachel Coulson, Tyrel Dulvarie, Marni Green, Hugo Poulet, Robert Tinning and Georgia Van Gils—move through the blocks and circles in centred formations, their lines clean and deliberate, every movement held to a narrow, exacting standard. They sometimes appeared like a tessellating pattern shifting into the negative space between each other.
There was a restrained energy in the first half of VISTA, almost a wariness, as though the performers are holding something back. The score by composer and sound designer Robin Fox, shaped the energy shifts and pace of the movement in this section. The synchronicity of the unpredictable mechanical music was mirrored by the dancers, almost as though the dancing and music were producing each form’s energy, the sound making the dancer…the dancers making the sound. The machinist cause-and-effect created a microcosm where this world’s formations were manufactured interactively, within one nucleus or system. The dancers continually reoriented themselves in group formations, but each form took its consequence from one soloist at a time, emitting a call and response between the group and an individual. But before long, once someone was shifted out of the formation they were gathered back into the collective. This occurred in both subtle and dramatic transitions. After complex phrases within duets and ensemble work, something would catch the soloist into the wider groups formation but simultaneously shift another dancer into isolation. The choreography, staging and lighting made me think of the up-close, zoomed-in imagery of a pixelated screen, so magnified that all colour and vibrancy is stripped and clarity is lost or unclear.
The second half of VISTA offered a visible contrast: organic tones prevailed within a transformed space achieved by five projector panels that carried a warm hue, projecting what appeared to be crumpled paper stretched from the ceiling. This moved the work away from the volume of the first half, zooming in on something more microscopic but making the set feel larger than life. We were invited to enter and pay close attention in this half.
Colour spread across the space, and the same six dancers who moved with such tight discipline in the beginning were now looser, almost like they were unravelling. Formations that previously felt locked and uniform, broke apart into separate, individual modes of expression. Partnered sequences that read as guarded engagements in the first half returned with something looser, more exposed and wild in the physicality of their execution. But the choreographic structure was almost identical to sequences we had already seen, with minor shifts to the action creating drastic changes in the qualities expressed which made this movement entirely different. I think this was achieved in the timing and duration of the movement qualities: repeated phrases were explored again but evoking a different, warped reality.
In one memorable section from the first half, dancer Georgia Van Gils stood upstage alone in the centre of the space while the stark white lights swallowed her silhouette. This allowed us to view the dancer as small in comparison to the set, intimidated by it, vulnerably on display, Van Gils seemed lost. She was almost interrogated by the lights and the rest of the group, who stood like an impenetrable wall down stage, facing her. This exact moment and formation was repurposed in this second half but it was entirely flipped spatially. This time Van Gils had her back to us. She faced the wall of dancers who were now situated upstage where they seem smaller, bathed in a warm glow. This choice told us a different side of the story—less fearful, the power dynamic had shifted. Lake used this device numerous times throughout VISTA. The second half of the work offered us time to recall and process that we has seen before, the dancers putting the pieces of the puzzle back together as they rebuilt the phrases for us, but differently.
It is as though the dancers are retelling something—something re-remembered, re-lived but mis-remembered. Different points-of-view were incorporated in the phrasing and movement structure in each half. Different dancers come into duets that were previously performed by others, re-writing the ‘story’ of the work from a different point-of-view. In the second half a layer of dialogue was filtered over some of the repetitions.
In another sequence in part one, dancer Marni Green glided both arms to the left, opening up the side of the body while sustaining fluid arm movements and complex folds of the arms that were placed across her body. These were movements that were focused, meditative and intentional. In the second half of VISTA, the same sequence was executed with on overlay of rolling eyes, huffing and puffing. The phrase (re)built into the same complex solo, but Green’s energy waned as she repeated it. It is as if her body was moving against her will this time. Green was not only repeating the same physical phrase monotonously but verbally complaining to the audience about it, saying “not again” … “stupid dancing.” It was as if time, energy and the ongoing nature of the dance were now out of her control. In this way, the second half, the dancers deviated from the careful and intentional construction of the former phrases and transformed them into almost passive participation. They were vessels for the experience of remounting the movement.
This repetition of the choreography offered the audience an opportunity to reflect on what happens in our own re-tellings. As a re-doing and re-staging, the re-performed is remembered differently—we don’t step into the same vista twice. Each time a sequence was offered up a second time it is from another angle entirely, and it was in this gap between the two versions that (perhaps) VISTA’s real question sat: how much of what we witness, experience and remember depends on where we happen to be standing when stuff happens?
All this sounds quite ponderous, quite reflective in real time, but VISTA moved so quickly that as my experiences of the work were forming I was catching moments, discarding them or rearranging them while watching. The work evoked a state of trance, of being held or suspended within or between the two worlds Lake created. With VISTA, Stephanie Lake delved into ideas about truth and alternate realities. Perhaps she was trying to produce something metaphysical—messing with what we understand as the fundamental nature of reality, existence and perception.
VISTA constructs a world in front of us, twice. It offers us sweeping views but reminds us that we might need to see those views from another angle.
___________________
It’s exciting to see so much dance recently at Carriageworks. The programmers offered an impressive array of contemporary dance across the winter. A week after seeing VISTA I was back to watch Australian Dance Theatre’s Two Blood, which Tammi Gissell reviewed for Dancing Sydney. There was also Katma by Azzam Mohamed and his many collaborators in June, reviewed by Dechen Gendun.
VISTA
Carriageworks, Redfern, 5-8 August 2026
Creator and Choreographer: Stephanie Lake
Dancers: Rachel Coulson, Tyrel Dulvarie, Marni Green, Hugo Poulet, Robert Tinning and Georgia Van Gils
Composer and Sound Designer: Robin Fox
Lighting Designer: Bosco Shaw
Costume Designer: Alpha60
Lighting Design Associate & Technical Manager: Rachel Lee
Presenters: Stephanie Lake Company and Carriageworks
Alexandria Panetta (Lexy) is a Sydney-based artist, choreographer and academic with a strong interest in dance performance, improvisation, writing and film. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Dance), a Bachelor of Arts (Education) and completed Honours in Dance Studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). In 2022, she was awarded a competitive research scholarship to undertake a Master of Philosophy (Creative Practice) at UNSW. Her thesis, Enacting (Re)Actions: Affect Theory and Embodied Resonance in Improvisational Contemporary Dance and Compositional Pedagogy, examines the generative core of improvisation and its role in choreographic development, contributing new perspectives to dance education across NSW and Australia. Lexy teaches across dance and education faculties at the Australian College of Physical Education(ACPE) and is Learning Associate for Sydney Dance Company (SDC) and a Teaching Artist touring with the company, bringing her research into dialogue with industry training and practice.