Stephanie Lake’s The Chronicles is a mesmerizing and evocative dance work that transcends the boundaries of movement, music and emotion. Playing at the Roslyn Packer Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival, this piece invites its audience into a visceral and haunting exploration of life’s emotional seasons, punctuated by a palpable sense of trauma, struggle and, ultimately, a yearning for innocence and release.
The performance opens with a stark and intimate image — a fetal form, curled and vulnerable — setting the tone for what will be a powerful journey through the cycles of life. This visceral opening, both physical and symbolic, recurs at the end, completing a full circle that reminds us of life’s inescapable trajectory toward death. In between, Lake crafts a nuanced, multi-layered experience, unfolding like a series of emotional chapters marked by loss, longing, and rebirth.
The dancers — Max Burgess, Rachel Coulson, Tra Mi Dinh, Tyrel Dulvarie, Marni Green, Ashley McLellan, Darci O’Rourke, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Robert Tinning, Georgia Van Gils, Kimball Wong and Jack Ziesing — are all formidable forces in their own right. Each dancer brings a distinct energy to the stage, contributing to a collective yet deeply personal exploration of the human experience. The physicality of the work is staggering, with movement that is as raw as it is poetic. Lake has a unique way of bringing gestural and pedestrian movement into an interesting movement vocabulary, that in this work mirrors the psychological and emotional burdens the dancers seem to be portraying. She utilises the simple line, creating fascinating transitions and canons that move the unrelenting waves of life along.
What sets The Chronicles apart is the way in which Lake intertwines the dance with the haunting music of the Sydney Children’s Choir, who perform a spectral rendition of “Ah Poor Bird” (traditional, arranged by Robin Fox). The song, with its mournful tone and the ethereal quality of the choir’s voices, becomes a central thread, reflecting the yearning for release amidst life’s inescapable challenges. There is a sense of tension between the beautiful harmonies of the choir and the sometimes chaotic energy of the dancers, as though they are reaching out for solace and understanding, but cannot quite escape the weight of their own existential struggles.
The imagery that Lake creates is both breathtaking and unnerving. The choir, dressed in just past knee length, white, almost ritualistic t-shirts (costumes designed by Harriet Oxley), stand in stark contrast to the earth-toned costumes of the dancers. Their presence on a mezzanine space, just above the action, gives them an otherworldly quality, as if they are both witness to and participants in the story unfolding below. Their lamps glow like beacons in the dark, evoking the sense of cultish devotion, or perhaps a glimmer of hope in the bleakest of times. The set design, by Charles Davis, contributes greatly to the work’s eerie atmosphere, as the choir occupies a field of tall grasses — an almost dreamlike landscape at the back of the stage — suggesting a liminal space between the living and the dead, the known and the unknown.
The physicality of the dancers and the emotional undercurrent of their movement seem to reflect stages of life itself. There are moments of violent struggle, where the dancers appear trapped in their own bodies or in the environments they occupy, mirroring the alienation and confusion often felt in childhood. This feeling of being ‘trapped’ is further compounded by the unsettling image of the children’s choir, whose almost cult-like presence suggests a collective haunting — an experience that mirrors the suffocating confines of a children’s home, or the struggles of growing up under oppressive systems. At times, the movement feels like a cathartic release, as though the dancers are trying to escape, but are constantly drawn back into the cycle, as if caught in a loop that resists closure.
The costumes — earthy in tone and texture — amplify this sense of naturalism, grounding the dancers in a raw physicality, while at the same time making them seem almost elemental, as though they are made from the very earth itself. The choreography uses transitions with masterful precision, evoking a sense of organic growth and decay, as one emotional state bleeds into the next, uncontainable and unavoidable.
And yet, amid the tension, The Chronicles ends on a note of haunting reflection with the solo vocals of Oliver Mann singing “Forever Young” (by Alphaville). The plaintive, almost desperate yearning in his voice feels like an acknowledgment of the fragility of life, and the desire to remain untouched by its inevitable hardships. The song feels both a plea for innocence and a rejection of the trauma that has marked the preceding moments. It is a fleeting moment of nostalgia, yet also a stark reminder that the passage of time is an inescapable force, one that none of us can outrun.
Ultimately, The Chronicles is a striking meditation on the cycle of life, death and everything in between. It weaves together the tension between beauty and horror, innocence and trauma, with an uncanny sense of emotional depth. Lake has created a work that is at once deeply unsettling and profoundly moving — a piece that refuses to offer easy answers, but instead invites the audience to confront the complexities of existence in all its forms. It is a work that lingers long after the final notes fade, as the audience is left to ponder the forces of time, memory and the unrelenting drive for release.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
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