A new pattern
DanceX
Week Two
Wednesday 15th October, 2025
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
Stephanie Lake Company
Auto Cannibal
West Australian Ballet
Extension to Boom
The Australian Ballet and Tim Harbour
The Delivery
Bangarra Dance Theatre
Yuldea (excerpt)
The Final Stage, my response to Week Two of DanceX, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
Folded forward at the waist, knees pressed together, but with her feet apart, Rachel Coulson shapes herself into a bird-like form. With her legs held as if bound at the knees, she travels backwards. Arms extended away from her torso giving the impression of wings, she rotates her hands as if her feathery tips are taking readings of the environment around her. In the conjuring of shapes, of course a waterbird appears before my eyes. This is part two of DanceX, presented by The Australian Ballet. Opening last night, with Stephanie Lake Company’s Auto Cannibal, replete with Coulson’s bird-like, solo flash, at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, Lake shares the stage with West Australian Ballet’s Extension to Boom, Tim Harbour’s The Delivery, and Bangarra Dance Theatre’s excerpt from Yuldea.
Commissioned by Australasian Dance Collective and LDTX/Beijing Dance in 2019, Auto Cannibal bears the influence of the supple fluidity and grounded nature[i] of the Chinese dancers Lake first created the work on, and how they navigated shared spaces. Ringed by the dancers, a series of ever-changing duets grows at the centre. Two dancers connect their extended feet together, before a third dancer taps in, ensuring nothing gets too settled, and a new duet emerges as the first dancer peels away and joins the outer ring once more. In this rotation of twos that change one by one, a chain of movement is passed and the arc of inheritance is drawn. Before gradually, this series of duets, too, gives way to a new pattern.
Auto Cannibal by Stephanie Lake Company, photographed by Jade Ellis
Sometimes we repeat ourselves. We toy with the same ideas, over and over, because we are drawn to them, and because we’ve yet to exhaust their potential. Because through looking deeper at something, something else is revealed in the process. Because nothing is ever fixed, ideas included, things, like duets, grow into something else. And so Lake brings to Auto Cannibal a sense of ‘have I said this before?’, ‘have you seen this before?’, ‘do you do the same?’ relatability[ii]. The process is unavoidable, and also capable of yielding a personal depth of understanding. I am familiar with many of these movements in Lake’s choreography and yet I have never seen them before. Equally, I am familiar with some of the movements from the beginning and yet when they are repeated either by the same dancer later on or by a different dancer, the movement is a new incarnation because it has built on the former and grown through variation or repeated telling.
This ‘as if sprung’ energy is also within West Australian Ballet’s Extension to Boom, in which “the dancers craft metaphorical question marks with their bodies”[iii]. Created in response to ‘Two Pianos’ by Bryce Dessner, the rolling boom comes not solely from the music, but from the choreography, and the mysterious landscape where the two meld together. A central, vertical line of dancers forms and peels off quickly to reveal those at the tail. Elsewhere, a horizonal line of dancers is revealed before it too quickly changes and the dancers pair with their neighbours, making three distinct couples. The cascading sensation here enhanced by the colours of the costumes as the two blues, two teals, and two pinks fuse. As things build, lines of dancers are held in increasingly stronger bands of lighting. There is a sense of never settling, which has carried through from Lake’s work, but in this piece, choreographed by George Williamson, reads differently again. As the dancers also form a large circle in which a rotating pair of dancers feature at the centre, the tidal wave is now a visual propulsion of a playfully, blistering percussive energy.
Tim Harbour’s world premiere The Delivery serves a slice of noir starring The Australian Ballet’s Hugo Dumapit, Adam Elmes, and Riley Lapham. For its love language and restaurant setting, I am reminded of the pared down, dead pan worlds within an Aki Kaurismäki film, where sorrow and harmony, melancholic yearning and resilience, exist simultaneously in the beautiful miniature. Harbour, too, reveals the world in a table setting, and Lapham in her apron could very well be Ilona from Drifting Clouds. Humour and humanity, course by course, replete with a steaming bowl of soup underneath a silver cloche. A flash of hope, a dash of intrigue, a clock rewinds and an alternate outcome is spun. Or had the former scenario which played been the thoughts of Lapham as she looked ahead and thought of what might be and in the realisation decided to steer a new ending before the credits rolled. Finnish tangos aside, perhaps what links the four works most is an exploration of cause and effect. From Harbour’s cause and effect mystery to Lake’s cause and effect of ideas, and West Australian Ballet’s cause and effect of sound to movement, this is the film I roll. With the programme concluding with Bangarra Dance Theatre’s take on the cause and effect of the climate emergency and social justice, to the haunting creak-creaks of the water-holding Mallee tree.
Ending with Act 3’s Black Mist from Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Yuldea, the black mist particles that rain down are radioactive[iv]. Their effect is devastating then, devastating now. There is no happy ending here, for there cannot be. What has been done to the land, to the community who care for Country, to those displaced due to colonisation, cannot be undone. In this context, the hope that I initially found within Yuldea, when seen in its entirety in 2023, is dampened. As I read of the last shrew[v] in Australia becoming extinct, this seems fitting. The note the excerpt sounds is: enough is enough. Cause and effect. Do anything but nothing.
[i] Stephanie Lake discussing her choreography for Auto Cannibal, https://www.stephanielake.com.au/auto-cannibal, accessed 16th October, 2025.
[ii] The same applies to me now as I write, have I written this before? When describing how bodies move with a series of words: am I repeating myself? Yes, I believe I am.
[iii] Extension to Boom synopsis, West Australian Ballet, DanceX foldout programme, The Australian Ballet, 2025.
[iv] In reference to the first atomic test conducted at “Emu Field, on the lands of the Aṉangu. Mushroom clouds reaching a height of 1.4 thousand metres were observed, with radioactive dust (Black Mist) being blown to locations up to 170 kilometres away”. Yuldea Study Guide, Bangarra Dance Theatre, https://www.bangarra.com.au/media/ju1fhc1v/bdt-yuldea-studyguidea4v11_2024.pdf, accessed 16th October, 2025.
[v] On the 11th of October, 2025, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List declared the Christmas Island shrew (Crocidura trichura) extinct. The Christmas Island shrew is the 39th species of Australian mammal to become extinct since 1788.
Image credit: Stephanie Lake Company’s Auto Cannibal, by Jade Ellis
