Ever dividing and colliding
Stephanie Lake’s Circle Electric & Harold Lander’s Études
The Australian Ballet
Wednesday 2nd October, 2024
Friday 4th October 4, 2024
Regent Theatre, Melbourne
Études
Choreography: Harald Lander
Staged by Johnny Eliasen
Guest Repetiteur: Mark Kay
Music: Knudåge Riisager after Carl Czerny
Artistic advisor: Lise Lander
Original lighting design: Harald Lander
Lighting reproduced in 2024 by Francis Croese
Conductor: Jonathan Lo
Études has been generously supported by The Ballet Society, Victoria.
Circle Electric
Choreography: Stephanie Lake
Rehearsal director: Kimball Wong
Composer: Robin Fox
Costume design: Paula Levis
Set design: Charles Davis
Lighting design: Bosco Shaw
Conductor: Joel Bass
Circle Electric has been generously supported by The Kenneth R Reed Fund, The Robert and Elizabeth Albert Music Fund, and the Peggy van Praagh Fund for Australian Choreography.
Orchestra Victoria
Hidden Worlds, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Études/Circle Electric, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
When Robert Hooke revealed the detailed workings of a single flea writ large on the page, in Micrographia (1665)[i], his translation of scale, from dot to a foldout copperplate engraving, was, and remains, awe-inspiring and accurate. In translating what he saw through the lens of a microscope, the unimaginable appeared, and left no room for particulars to hide. Just as Micrographia’s full title is some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries thereupon, in some ways the same could be extended to fit Stephanie Lake’s new work, Circle Electric, commissioned by The Australian Ballet. Circle Electric makes a magnifying glass of the stage, and places different dancers in different configurations in the spotlight with the intention of observing them and thereupon making inquiries. And while the dancers are not specimens, per se, like the famous flea, the ant, or the louse, they do show hidden worlds and marvels. Hidden worlds and marvels which earlier in the year had their world premiere in Sydney, and now, at last, their Melbourne premiere at the Regent Theatre, shown alongside Harald Lander’s Études, last presented by the company in 2012.
Looking at Hooke’s documented patterns a piece of petrified wood makes, in comparison to that of frozen matter, or the honey-comb like units[ii] that make up the structure of cork, is akin to looking at my imagined choreographic floorplan for Circle Electric, where dancers shake into new formations like blight on a rose leaf. Huddling in groups not organised by height, but governed by a different rule, the perimeter of a large, illuminated ring, the effect is magnetic. With set design by Charles Davis, and lighting design by Bosco Shaw, this ring contains the dancers, until they skitter free, only to be slid, sometimes literally, back under the intense glare of the microscope. The dancers, presenting as a biological system of molecules, grow and disassemble, moving as one mass, ever dividing and colliding. Circle Electric begins as a “microscopic investigation of the intricate and the intimate” before, like Hooke’s flea, revealing the bigger picture, “expanding to encompass a telescopic view of humanity”[iii], in Lake’s first full-length work as resident choreographer with The Australian Ballet.
Springing from what is now referred to as Circle Electric: Prologue, a shorter work Lake created in 2023 for six Australian Ballet dancers, Circle Electric is now fleshed into a work for 50-plus company dancers. As 2020’s Multiply[iv], a 400-person-strong dance event beautifully revealed, Lake is not only familiar with, but revels in working with large casts. In Multiply, participants of all abilities and skill were invited to vibrate and cut loose in Prahran Square, as high above a drone recorded their orchestrated movements, making colourful ants of one and all. Grouped by colour, each block of people pulsed as if cells on a slide. Circle Electric taps into this collective energy, where many limbs operate as a collective whole, before homing in on the mannerisms of an individual, such as when Benedicte Bemet, as the apex of a large triangle formation, appears winged by those behind her. As a sky of many peaked arms arced in flight is drawn, whether zoomed out or in, splitting or multiplying, speaking of cells or insects, certain hair-loose hallmarks are sought and ever present.
Crab claw, pincer-slicing, one by one the dancers falter and collapse to the ground, scooped up or pre-emptively caught, as if by telepathic connection, by those around them. With orchestrations by Erkki Veltheim, this tenderness, particularly typified by Adam Elmes, is the empathetic foil to the earlier Muybridge horse in motion[v], running the course, over and over, on all fours. A circuit breaker, it speaks to the weight of consequences.
In this state of one perceived known becoming something else, Circle Electric situates itself. In what Lake describes as the “slippage point”[vi], between recklessness and precision, passing the electrical current, like a game of school yard ‘tag, you’re it’ mutates into a more sinister mass electrocution sequence. Ever one convulsion away from tipping into a contrastive reading of the world, where a ring of light can be a place of shelter and an exposed stadium of jeering onlookers. Overhead, composer Robin Fox seamlessly weaves bird calls before a city awakens, before later plumbing the subterranean and amplifying the earth’s heartbeat, and the ring of light appears almost as if a nest. The knot of dancers inside the safety of the nest, in costumes with neat rows of repeating and connected circles, designed by Paula Levis, move as individuals before raising their arms upwards in unison. The secondary nest their overlapped arms creates against the dark sky, draws a precarious, momentary safety. The circles on their costumes call to mind the luminous nodules on the side of a finch’s beak which serve as a ‘feed me’ beacon for when the parents return to the nest. Together with their arms lifting skyward, the nestling dancers practice survival of the fittest: the individual conforms to the group, the biggest and loudest gets fed. And just like that, a nest is next a sports’ stadium. The circled costumes, like the luminous nodules of the nestlings themselves, disappear over time, replaced by tonal variations of a theme, and Lander’s grand-plié-in-fifth-position Études after interval.
Seen in this order, Lander’s oft-described love letter to classical technique and the daily ritual of company class, Études (1948) mirrors Lake’s dancers milling on the stage as if in a theatre’s foyer during their own interval: foundation making, opinion forming. The intended contrast between the two hinted at similarities too, albeit through dissimilar steps and meanings ascribed. From the lines and shapes drawn on the stage, an ‘X’ of light in Études grand jeté express for a ring of current in Circle Electric, to the silhouettes at the barre for the conveyor belt frieze running across the top half of the stage, the ‘studies’ build, piece by piece, as muscles warm up. And though both works showcase the company as a whole, it would be remiss not to mention Samara Merrick in Circle Electric, and the brilliant precision of Ako Kondo, Chengwu Guo, and Joseph Caley in Études.
The connection between the two worlds is made all the more apparent when you consider that Lake created Circle Electric in response to knowing it would be presented with Études[vii]. Lake almost intercepts Lander’s slow-speed, controlled chaînés on the diagonal. Both, in their own way, exploring notions of repeat, repeat, repeat, and full velocity; Lake, through freedom, Ladner, control. Ending the night with the exhilaration, and nowhere to hide exactitude of Études, the wait for 2025 begins.
[i] Copperplate engravings from a recently conserved first edition of Hooke’s Micrographia, https://pictures.royalsociety.org/pro254, The Royal Society, UK, accessed 3rd October, 2024.
[ii] Which incidentally, befittingly led to Hooke coining the biological term “cell”
[iii] Circle Electric synopsis, The Australian Ballet Études/Circle Electric Sydney and Melbourne 2024 program, p. 14.
[iv] Stephanie Lake’s Multiply, https://www.stephanielake.com.au/multiply, accessed 3rd October 3, 2024.
[v] Eadweard Muybridge, Attitudes of Animals in Motion, 1879, The Met, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/700109, accessed 2nd October, 2024.
[vi] Stephanie Lake in interview, ‘Exploring artistry: Meet our Resident Choreographer Stephanie Lake, The Australian Ballet, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPOvugvnTR0, accessed 2nd October, 2024
[vii] David Hallberg in conversation with Jonathan Lo, Hallberg in Conversation, Saturday 5th October, 2024, Regent Theatre.
Image credit: The Australian Ballet in Stephanie Lake’s Circle Electric by Kate Longley
