One of the dance highlights of the 2016 Sydney Festival is the premiere of a work by Australian choreographer Stephanie Lake.
Lake is fast becoming an big name. Since her first major choreographic commission in 2010 from Chunky Move, she has choreographed for the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Chunky Move, Sydney Dance Company, Stompin youth dance company and Dance Massive. She is the recipient of the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, the Peggy van Praagh Choreographic Fellowship and a number of awards. She formed Stephanie Lake Company in 2014.
Her new work is called Double Blind and was inspired initially by a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. The experiments were designed to measure a person’s willingness to obey an authority figure even when it went against their conscience. For the test the participants believed that they were inflicting pain on another subject by administering electric shock.
In collaboration with audio-visual artist Robin Fox, Lake took the idea of electrical voltage as the starting point for her work. “He was interested in the idea of using voltage as a trigger for the movement,” Lake says. “When the dancers hold cables and touch each other it sounds like the sound is coming out of the other person’s body. He calls [it being a] ‘human synthesiser’.”
But while Double Blind’s inspiration was the Milgram experiments, Lake emphasises the work has evolved into a much broader exploration of “consequences and personal responsibility”. And “while it comes from a serious beginning it is quite funny and playful”, she says.
The dancers are Kyle Page, Amber Haines, Alastaire Macindoe and Alana Everett.
To see a video of Double Blind in development, go to http://insitearts.com.au/double-blind/
Double Blind will run at Carriageworks Bay 20 from January 19 to 24. Other Sydney Festival events include SPEAR, Stephen Page’s debut feature film featuring
Bangarra Dance Theatre (January 23-24, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House) and Rosas Dance Company from Belgium, and Marregeku from Western Australia (see article on page ???).
To see a longer interview with Stephanie Lake, go to http://www.danceaustralia.com.au/news/stephanie-lake
This article was first published in the Dec 15/Jan 16 of Dance Australia.