Luminous filaments
ESCALATOR
Presented by Stephanie Lake Company, in association with Abbotsford Convent
Wednesday 6th August, 2025
Magdalen Laundry & Industrial School, Abbotsford Convent, Abbotsford
Alice Dixon The Folded Scene
Marni Green Slipping Into Filth
Robert Alejandro Tinning Sandunga
Thomas Woodman cold slow shock
Carmen Yih AUSSIEAUSSIEAUSSIE
Producer: Beth Raywood Cross
Lighting Design and Production: Rachel Lee
Lighting Associate: Nick Moloney
Producer Intern: Kayla Douglas
Curated by: Stephanie Lake Company
Stepping Up, my response to the 2025 season of Escalator, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
Time to step on the moving staircase once more, Escalator, presented and curated by Stephanie Lake Company, in association with Abbotsford Convent, is back. Having debuted in 2023, with new choreographic works by Kayla Douglas, Kady Mansour, Melissa Pham & Jayden Wall, Luke Currie-Richardson, and Harrison Ritchie-Jones, it is time for a new group to appear on the circulating belt. Appearing in the 2025 rotation, a program of new choreographic works by Alice Dixon, Marni Green, Robert Alejandro Tinning, Thomas Woodman, and Carmen Yih. With them they bring the promise of a burrow, solidarity, risk, reconfiguration, and a reference to Sarah Polley’s 2011 film, Take This Waltz, which, like all things, when shown in a different context, the invitation to interpret and spin it your own way, multiplies the possibilities: “You seem restless, in a kind of permanent way”. Indeed, a wonderful, often playful, restless impermanence seems to permeate the whole escalation, as images malfunction and limbs fold into unforgiving surfaces.
In the Magdalen Laundry and Industrial School, the scene is set, with two rows of seats and stools for the perching, and cushions for crouching, lining either side of the runway stage. Woodman’s cold slow shock, performed also by Woodman, proposes that “risk is often pursued and avoided in the same breath”[i]. Entering from a side door, Woodman appears, an orange electrical cord trailing behind him and an air of having found said cord in “a cupboard out the back”. “This is a 15-metre electrical cord”, he professes. “This is not a 15-metre electrical cord”, he counters, flipping the script, and playing with notions of “sometimes what you see is [not] what you get”. Like a philosophical chair that is not a chair, the found cord becomes a bridge and not a bridge, as Woodman, with the aid of an audience member, raises the cord in the air, diagonally across the stage that isn’t really a stage either. And in that moment, the cord could have become a single chain of nucleotides replete with cold-shock proteins bound to it, and Woodman a manifestation of the cardiorespiratory cold shock response in a health and safety demonstration.
With five varied responses compressed into bite-sized packages, from talk of UFOs, which both do and don’t exist, things flow slowly, effortlessly into Tinning’s multi-faceted Sandunga. The title drawn from colloquial Spanish, references “an individual’s inner life flavour and rhythm”[ii], and in this incarnation, with composer Louis Frere-Harvey, Tinning lays “down a movement language for [himself]” as he retraces “steps to belonging”[iii]. Spanning the personal to a broader sense, as Tinning repeatedly, purposefully taps his right fist to his heart, “a diaspora holds many things,” shaped and changed over time, though empowerment, support, and “solidarity with many peoples at once”.[iv]
Green’s Slipping Into Filth summons from the adjoining room. Performed by Mara Galagher and Avril Eatherley, in costumes, like Sundunga also designed by Andrew Treloar, it is time to “go back into the burrow with you”, having offered “all of my skin [to] you” and received “fruit in return”.[v] Galagher, in a Rapunzel-long wig, sits on the floor, ruminating over a mandarin, whether recently received or to be given, as yet unclear. Sound designer Robin Fox has conjured a subterranean feel, befitting an excavation, laced with what appears to be the sounds of a mischief of rats scurrying. Long has it been said that rats have a commensal relationship with humans, eating at the same table. Perhaps I imagined this, and joined it to Galagher’s long fingernails operating like inquisitive paws, paws she later uses to select a tendril of Eatherley’s wig, and nibble, nibble, nibble to the drip, drip, drip of the downpipe. Though the cold of the environment feels bone deep, Galagher’s movements suggest a graceful nimbleness, even when she gnaws at her own feet and transforms a hanging potted plant into a leafy headdress, all but obscuring her face. Rats being social, empathetic to the last, and clean animals, perhaps the “filth” of the title speaks to how some humans view other species that live alongside us, in the shadows, cleaning up our excess of waste material.
Returning to the first room to find the seating reconfigured in a slight curve facing the back wall, the inkblot interpretations continue with Dixon’s The Folded Scene. Dixon, together with Martin Hansen and Rachel Mackie, give the cinematic and symbolic cymbal crash finale, á la Stanley Kubrik’s The Shining (1980), set to Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz. 106, a rewrite, in “a kind of [for tonight] permanent way”. Something about Rachel Lee’s lighting now makes manifest, for me, a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film and New German Cinema of the second half of the twentieth century. On a cushion, peering between the shoulders of those sat before me, I see fragments of Dixon, Hansen, and Mackie as they wave and catch sound, and I weave these luminous filaments into my own film.
The ride concludes with Carmen Yih’s AUSSIEAUSSIEAUSSIE to the disturbing and patriotic strains of “Come to the land of tomorrow / Come to the land of Opportunity / Men for the land / Women for the home / Australia for the White Man”.[vi] Before an acidic lime and yellow palette, pushing the ‘green and gold’ national colours to the maximum, Yih operates at unrelenting super speed, a ball of surface-deep optimism in the face of racism. Projected on the screen behind her, as footage of the Coronation of King Charles III, and right-wing Senator Pauline Hanson begins to glitch to a ceremonial close, Yih, too, collapses like a dead pixel.
To borrow from Ali Smith, and alter slightly, “all short [dances] long”.
[i] Thomas Woodman, cold slow shock choreographic notes, Escalator 2025, Abbotsford Convent, https://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/escalator-eventprogram/, accessed 6th August, 2025.
[ii] Robert Alejandro Tinning, Sandunga Flow classes at Lucy Guerin Inc, https://lucyguerininc.com/calendar/sandunga-flow-w-robert-tinning-21-august-2025, accessed 7th August, 2025.
[iii] Tinning quoted in interview with Stephanie Lake by Susan Bendell, ‘Stephanie Lake’s Escalator: Elevating Emerging Voices in Dance’, https://www.danceaustralia.com.au/news/stephanie-lake-s-escalator-returns-elevating-emerging-voices-in-dance, accessed 7th August, 2025.
[iv] Tinning, Sandunga choreographic notes, Escalator 2025, Abbotsford Convent.
[v] Marni Green, Slipping Into Filth choreographic notes, Escalator 2025, Abbotsford Convent.
[vi] All slogans are direct quotes from real Australian emigration posters. Carmen Yih, AUSSIEAUSSIEAUSSUE choreographic notes, https://hitahhchi.cargo.site/AUSSIEAUSSIEAUSSIE, accessed 7th August, 2025.
Image credit: Mara Galagher and Avril Eatherley in Marni Green’s Slipping Into Filth at Escalator presented by Stephanie Lake Company, by Marc Gambino
