Contemporary dance isn't known for getting too comfortable – an à la mode experience is the expectation, uniquely different genre styles coming together as one.
Multi award-winning Australian choreographer, director and dancer Stephanie Lake is no amateur at this. With a career spanning 20 years and too many performance accolades to list, ‘Matrix’ is the new choreographic double bill combining her talents with those of eminent Chinese choreographer Ma Bo (BeijingDance/LDTX).
Stephanie reflects on the collaborative work 20 Australian and Chinese dancers developed together in Beijing, and how cultural differences became bonding agents rather than something divisive.
“I was really trepidatious I’ll be honest with you, colleagues and peers that had worked in China before had said the language barrier is challenging and that it does slow things down, but it was something I was barely cognisant of as we were working,” Stephanie says.
“I mean we’re all working with our bodies and so there were things happening that I was able to communicate just through gesture and even just the tone of my voice and the way I’m moving that they would just get immediately. There were also a couple of really strong English speakers in the cast from the Chinese company who were translating things really quickly, but even aside from that it was actually just a really beautiful example of how much we have in common.”
Stephanie goes on to reveal more about the creative process.
“I went into this with no fixed idea of what I wanted it to be. I thought. . . 'I don’t want to go in with a rigid idea and try and execute that with 20 people that I don’t know that well, most of them I don’t know at all'. I think that was a good choice because the dancers themselves are so embedded in the work and that’s helped to really keep it alive and kind of sexy.”
Although it is a collaborative project, choreographically there were independent concepts taking place.
Image © Yin Sir
“We’ve both got total control over our own work – Ma Bo worked with the dancers for three weeks, then I worked with the dancers for two weeks. The evening work is a double bill of those two works divided by an interval, so any kind of cross over between the works is kind of accidental or a nice synchronicity.”
If you’re concerned about not having seen a contemporary dance theatre show previously, well – it’s a non-issue, as Stephanie explains.
“I’m most happy when I’ve put a show on and there are people in the audience that come up to me afterwards and they’ve never seen contemporary dance before. They have no framework for it. They don’t know what they’re watching. They ended up there somehow because someone’s dragged them along and they’ve had an amazing experience. They’ve been moved and they’ve been kind of writhing in their seats and they’ve been emotionally triggered by it in some way that they weren’t expecting.
“That is so exciting for me.”
Stephanie returns to an earlier point made about the significance of projects such as this which bring people closer together.
“In a time when things are so divided, ugly nationalism and all this kind of stuff, it’s really important to understand each other and find those commonalities, so for me that was the take away from this project – I just loved those dancers, they were so quirky and interesting and [had a] great sense of humour. Incredible work ethic.
“It was inspiring I’ll say that, they work incredibly hard and they’re very, very diligent and respectful and I just thought that was really inspiring.”
