There is up and there is down
Bodytorque: Gravity
The Australian Ballet
Thursday 5th September, 2026
Lawler Studio, Southbank Theatre
Holding You
Choreography and costume concept: Lilla Harvey
Music: Lonnie Johnson, Looking for a Sweetie
Recording: Lonnie Johnson
Claude Debussy, Reverie L.68
Recording: Øyen
Study Number One
Choreography and costume concept: Pol Andrés Thió
Music: John Bartmann, Nightshift and Memory Shores
Additional sound design: Vanessa Sanchez-Cosic
Event Horizon
Choreography and costume concept: Timothy Coleman
Composer: May Lyon, Event Horizon and Fractal Space
Featuring: Ernest R. Ball and J. Keirn Brennan, Let the Rest of the World Go By Recording Jo Stafford and Gordon MacRae
Additional sound design: Timothy Coleman
“Event Horizon” is based on a short story and uses a script written by Macy Trethewey, used with kind permission from the author.
With thanks to voice talent provided by Claire Spencer, Charlton Tough, Henry Berlin and Marcus Morelli.
In Conversation
Choreography and costume concept: Maxim Zenin
Original poetry: Maxim Zenin
Music: Sergei Rachmaninov arr. Laurent Le Coustumer, Variation 18, Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini Op. 43
Piano: Jeremy Chan, Marion Pender Piano Fellow
Alexander Glazunov, Entre-acte from Raymonda Op. 57
Recording: Leonid Kogan and Andrei Mitnik, Courtesy of Sony Music Australia
GETHSEMANE
Choreography and costume concept: Mason Lovegrove
Music: Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Cherubical Hymn (No. 6 from Liturgy of St John Chrysostom Op. 41) Recording USSR Ministry of Culture Chamber Choir conducted by Valery Polyansky
Möbius
Choreography and costume concept: Serena Graham
Music: Michael Grebla, Unbreakable
Piano: Jeremy Chan, Marion Pender Piano Fellow
Cello: Josephine Vains, Courtesy of Orchestra Victoria
Centre of Gravity, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Bodytorque 2026, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
Gravity, physics tells us and the body shows, is a physical force which draws us “towards one another and shapes the way we move through the world”, and whether it is something to “resist, surrender to, suspend [or] redefine”[i], it is a necessary condition of us. Our very survival depends on it. Gravity is also the theme of this year’s Bodytorque program, featuring the choreographic voices of Timothy Coleman, Serena Graham, Lilla Harvey, Mason Lovegrove, Pol Andrés Thió, and Maxim Zenin, led once more by The Australian Ballet’s resident choreographer Stephanie Lake. Whether making their choreographic Bodytorque debut, like Harvey, Zenin, and Australian Ballet School graduate and internationally-based choreographer, Thió, or further flexing their creative muscles, like Coleman, Graham, and Lovegrove, who have created works for 2024’s New World Record and earlier Bodytorque iterations, the program remains a unique and supportive “opportunity to test ideas, create a new short work, and, importantly, put it in front of an audience”[ii].
And so, on opening night, before a full house at Southbank Theatre’s Lawler Studio, Harvey presents Holding You, her exploration of “what it means to be held”[iii] by the reassuring anchor of the familiar. To Harvey, “Gravity is [what holds] you in place”, that place being home. As such, the stage is lit by a standing lamp, positioned opposite a single chair. Two simple props that evoke a room for her dancers, Drew Hedditch and Montana Rubin, to inhabit. Two dancers, simultaneously, alight in the galaxy, held in fields of space, as Hedditch connects the soles of his feet to Rubin’s in an anticlockwise rotation, slowly unravelling on the floor. Joined, as if a mirror, two parts of a seamless whole, they are matter and space. “We can do a lot of spooning” sings Lonnie Johnson, “and loving by starlight”. Held in a ring of light, accompanied by Johnson’s distinctive note by note with a pick, his Looking for a Sweetie’s longing echoes Harvey’s own query: what happens if we become too heavy to hold, when “my whole life on you depends”? As Ruben arches her form up and over Hedditch’s left shoulder, her legs extend as if a shooting star, before encircling him, there is the sweet and hard of Johnson’s “am I dreaming dreams of you that’s all in vain?”[iv] There is longing in the pas de deux, and accompanying shadow silhouettes, tenderness and promise.
There is up and there is down. To a study of gravity, a dance of two is what binds all the works presented, with Dimity Azoury and Zenin, in Zenin’s In Conversation poetic bond; Macy Trethewey and Corey Gavan fraying at the end-of-days in Coleman’s Event Horizon; Riley Lapham and Charlton Tough in Thió’s amplified sensation, Study Number One; and Milo Bayly and Henry Berlin in Lovegrove’s rupture to Tchaikovsky in the garden of GETHSEMANE. Even at the close, with Graham’s Möbius strip as a metaphor, Isobelle Dashwood and Jarryd Madden are matched by Aya Watanabe and Marko Juusela, “two couples… evolving, adapting, and enduring without breaking”[v] across a continuous surface. Back-to-back, with interlinking arms, one cupping the sky above, the other tenting the earth below, the couples, in cut-out costumes referencing the twisted cylinder, reshape in response to an invisible force. Interlocking like the turning gears along the length of a möbius strip (a surface with one continuous side formed by cutting a single strip and twisting it prior to reattaching the two ends) they create a surface with a boundary.
Across all six works, the dancers test the force of their interactions, and the laws governing those interactions, as if seeking to disprove that all material things must fall down or move downward in a succession of balances. Just as Newton showed that when a force is applied to material bodies, it changes their speed or direction of motion, or both, aloft, Azoury, Lapham, Watanabe et al. soar, spiral, and present not just the illusion of being in defiance of gravity but conversely embody its very changeability and responsiveness.
One by one, Lake invites the choreographers onto the stage to reveal their intentions behind the work, their experience of being a dancer directing another dancer’s body, and how they approached and played with this year’s theme, and in doing so lays bare the bravery and inquisitiveness of the six choreographers. To Zenin, gravity is a friendship, love, and familial bond that when nurtured grows stronger, and “endures far beyond our human timeline” in his hope for “future generations to inherit a world of empathy, sincerity and humanity”. From gravity as solemnity of manner, to Thió, this is tied to how the weight of “gravity inhabits movement… in our contact and connection with each other”. To Coleman, by contrast, a couple disconnect in Event Horizon, based on a short story, with a script by Tretheway. In the last ten minutes before the Earth is drawn “towards complete destruction”, in an intense gravitational field, gravity is both physical and emotional.
Just as Galileo diluted the body in motion (by studying them on an inclined plane, since freefall proved too fast to measure), Bayly and Berlin “collapse into one another”, as if measuring the soul. Bayly, suspended, threads herself through the invisible arc of Berlin’s arms, in Lovegrove’s fissure in the fabric of time. They are parts of the self, “an archive, carrying memories”[vi]. As Bayly upright, stands facing the audience, Berlin wraps behind her on the horizontal axis. Cradled in the small of her back, with his legs and head extended, together they make a plus symbol. Stretching like a horizon line, Berlin’s costume is a twinkling night sky. This and other transcendental moments remain with me as I head out into the night, for though I cannot see the stars overhead (in the city), I know that they are there.
[i] David Hallberg, Artistic Director, Bodytorque: Gravity foldout program, The Australian Ballet, 2026.
[ii] Stephanie Lake, Resident Choreographer and Bodytorque Mentor, Bodytorque: Gravity foldout program, 2026.
[iii] Lilla Harvey, Holding You synopsis, Bodytorque: Gravity foldout program, 2026.
[iv] “I’ve lived a beautiful life. It’s been kind of rough in spots; like everybody, I have ups and downs in life. I’ve seen it very sweet, and I’ve seen it very hard, when you couldn’t get a job, no kind of a job, doing nothing. But somehow or other, I managed it, I managed to make it.” Lonnie Johnson in conversation about his experiences with producer Moses Asch, Lonnie Johnson: The Complete Folkways Recordings, unreleased until 1982, 64 Parishes, https://64parishes.org/entry/lonnie-johnson, accessed 4th September, 2026.
[v] Serena Graham, Möbius synopsis, Bodytorque: Gravity foldout program, 2026.
[vi] Mason Lovegrove, GETHSEMANE synopsis, Bodytorque: Gravity foldout program, 2026.
Image credit: Riley Lapham in Study Number One choreographed by Pol Andrés Thió, photographed by Kate Longley
