A refracted view
PRISM
The Australian Ballet
Thursday 25th September, 2025
Regent Theatre, Melbourne
Glass Pieces
Jerome Robbins
Seven Days (World Premiere)
Stephanie Lake
Blake Works V (The Barre Project)
William Forsythe
Points of View, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Prism, drawn up especially for Fjord Review. The Australian Ballet’s triple bill, Prism, is dedicated to the memory of Garth Welch AM, a founding principal artist of the company.
From the back of the stage, against the dark ground, a single searchlight points in the direction of the audience, and as it does, it sweeps across the forms of seven dancers in Resident Choreographer with The Australian Ballet Stephanie Lake’s Seven Days. The scene is playfully reminiscent of taking a photo of a varnished painting in a museum and finding a reflection has appeared on the surface of your documented image. A tourist halo that you have made in collaboration with a masterpiece, that alters the composition. Seven Days revels in the “contrast between classical and contemporary art by pairing the powerful and well-known ‘Goldberg Variations’ with brand-new choreography to create something truly unique”[i]. The large searchlight blinks, and a new day unfolds.
Adam Elmes, Benjamin Garrett, Lilla Harvey, Callum Linnane, Samara Merrick, Elijah Trevitt, and Yaru Xu are said seven dancers, seven days, seven variations, and totality. Together, a week, they make, but not literally so, just as the score is Peter Brikmanis’s reimagining after J.S. Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. To pared back staging, pared back music, space to breath and interpret each of the seven movements is the focus, and the effect is hypnotic. At the foot of the stage, the dancers lie down. One after the other, they roll over, roll over, like the nursery rhyme. In a physical transference of energy, one by one, they take turns to roll over, roll over in the return direction, drawing a close to a day.
The orchestra, under the direction of guest conductor Charles Barker, click their fingers repeatedly and in doing so extend an “invitation to experience the familiar made strange”[ii]. Several members of Orchestra Victoria tease at scrunched up balls of paper to create a crackle. Others blow and whistle, to conjure the sound of a windswept environment. Coupled with the audible breathing of the dancers, and the fragments gleaned of their conversations on stage as they meet in a circle, in the intimacy of Lake’s world premiere, Seven Days, I lap up the opportunity to see the great world spin anew.
Forsythe has shaped his Blake Works V (The Barre Project) around the dancers of The Australian Ballet and laid bare a concise work drawn from a broad vocabulary. Affirming that “if dance only does what we assume it can do, it will expire”, Forsythe keeps “trying to test the limits of what the word choreography means.”[iii] As the work expands, in accordance with Blake’s ‘Buzzard & Kestrel’ moving from a non-reverberant space to a cavernous one, before contracting, audibly, but not in scope, Forsythe gives the dancers room to play with pattern and echo. Initially “conceived at the height of the pandemic as an homage to the legions of dancers who, while holding on to any available piece of domestic furniture, attempted to sustain their professional abilities with at-home barre exercises”[iv], it is akin to Virginia Woolf’s “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”[v]: a series of recurring illuminations in the darkness. Thrown into sharp relief, before the central barre, the dancers spark and repeat, spark and repeat. Moving so fast, and against the darkest of stages, their limbs create optical illusions. Not only do they appear to elongate, but trace lines appear around their forms. As arms float, winged, suggestive of flight, the movement arc is visible. Like a chalk drawing on a sheet of paper, or the track lines of birds in flight, the stage is a sky of zip ribbons. The dancers move with increased directness, as the intensity steadily builds, before — snap! — ending in a flash of lightening.
In Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces, performed for the first time by dancers of The Australian Ballet, Robyn Hendricks and Maxim Zenin, as Principal Couple to ‘Façades’, captivate. As they roll their upper bodies over their legs in a wide, deep fourth position plié, they fold their arms around their torsos. Together, their upper bodies bob up and down, as if in exaggerated, synchronised breath or in water, their bodies responding to the currents around them. Submerged against a blue backdrop, behind them, a line of dancers in silhouette appear as a moving frieze. My eyes leap between Hendricks and Zenin’s pas de deux and the thread of dancers. In profile, knees bent as they progress across the stage, the effect of these two distinct visuals is breathtaking. As every second dancer peels off and moves down the line, resuming their place in the sequence, I am aware that to see it all, similar to Blake’s kestrel, is an impossibility. For though things are pared back in all three works, this rarely means that everything can be seen all at once.
Which is where I land, as I leave the theatre. Yearning to have been able to pause long enough to have seen it all, but aware that this layered and refracted view is also its strength and beauty. Ever changing, ever reinventing itself, a diversity of viewpoints.
Robyn Hendricks and Maxim Zenin in Jerome Robbins's Glass Pieces photographed by Kate Longley
[i] “Building upon past work, and finding new ways to interpret it… Bach’s legacy continues”. Peter Brikmanis quoted by Heather Bloom, ‘Back to Bach’, The Australian Ballet’s Prism programme, 2025, p. 33.
[ii] Seven Days synopsis, The Australian Ballet’s Prism programme, 2025, p. 13.
[iii] William Forsythe quoted by Deborah Jones, ‘Act of Devotion’, The Australian Ballet’s Prism programme, 2025, p. 22.
[iv] Blake Works V (The Barre Project) synopsis, The Australian Ballet’s Prism programme, 2025, p. 12.
[v] Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1927), Part III, Chapter 3, p. 249.
Glass Pieces
Choreography: Jerome Robbins
Music: Philip Glass, Glass Pieces (‘Rubric’ and ‘Façades’ from Glassworks, and excerpts from Akhnaten)
Costume design: Ben Benson
Lighting design: Jennifer Tipton
Music performed by Orchestra Victoria
Seven Days (World Premiere)
Choreography: Stephanie Lake
Music: Peter Brikmanis, after J.S. Bach ‘Goldberg Variations’
Costume design: Kate Davis
Lighting design: Bosco Shaw
Music performed by Orchestra Victoria
The Robert & Elizabeth Albert Music Fund will support Peter Brikmanis’s reimagining of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variation for Stephanie Lake’s Seven Days.
Blake Works V (The Barre Project)
Choreography: William Forsythe
Staged by Jodie Gates and Noah Gelber
Music: James Blake, ‘Lindisfarne I’, published by Concord Music Publishing, recording courtesy of Universal Music Group. ‘Buzzard & Kestrel’, published by Concord Music Publishing, recording courtesy of Hessle Audio. ‘Lullaby for My Insomniac’, published by Sony Music Publishing (Australia) Pty Limited, recording courtesy of Universal Music Group. ‘200 Press’, published by Sony Music Publishing (Australia) Pty Limited, recording courtesy of Buzzard And Kestrel Ltd.
Lighting design (Prologue): Tanja Rühl
Lighting design (The Barre Project): Tanja Rühl, based on original design by Brandon Stirling Baker
Stage design: William Forsythe
Costume design: William Forsythe
Sound Supervisor: Niels Lanz
Premiere: 10th May, 2023, Ballet Company Teatro alla Scala, Teatro alla Scala, Milan, Italy. Originating from The Barre Project (Blake Works II), created and filmed in 2020 for its first broadcast on 25th March, 2021, on the CLI Studio Digital Platform clistudios.com
Image credit: The Australian Ballet’s Callum Linnane, Benjamin Garrett, Adam Elmes, Elijah Trevitt, Yaru Xu, Lilla Harvey, and Samara Merrick in Stephanie Lake Company’s Seven Days by Kate Longley
