Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival.
12 March 2026.
Award-winning Australian choreographer Stephanie Lake brings her bold and ambitious The Chronicles to the Adelaide Festival, delivering a powerful contemporary dance experience that is both visually arresting and emotionally resonant.
From the opening moments, Lake’s choreography commands attention. Performed by the dancers of Stephanie Lake Company, the ensemble surges across the stage with relentless energy and precision. Dancers shift between tightly coordinated formations, solos and duets, creating an ebb and flow that mirrors the rhythms of life itself. The movement is joyful, energetic and buoyant yet grounded, filled with remarkable strength and power, yet executed with such fluency that it often appears effortless. The choreography demands extraordinary stamina, focus and commitment from the performers.
The dancers, each with a distinct body shape, look and movement quality, bring individuality to the collective force of the ensemble. Lake’s choreography highlights these differences while maintaining a powerful sense of unity.
The sonic landscape, composed by Robin Fox, is exceptional. Pulsating, rhythmic electronic music propels the choreography forward, at times accelerating the audience’s heartbeat along with it. The long-standing creative partnership between Lake and Fox once again proves electrifying, their work together once again creating magic.
Lake structures The Chronicles as a series of distinct chapters, each with its own atmosphere, costume palette and lighting language. The work traces a journey from an embryonic beginning through the many energies of life – connection, chaos, joy and struggle – before ultimately arriving at death.
Along the way, the choreography incorporates creative use of breath, voice and song, in an inventive, joyful and at times sombre collaboration with the talented performers of Young Adelaide Voices and solo vocalist Oliver Mann. These unique moments of sound deepen the sense of shared experience between performers and audience.
Visually, the production is rich in texture. Bosco Shaw’s lighting design plays a central role, with dramatic shifts, shadows and flashes of strobe transforming the stage into evolving environments. Textiles shape the visual world, from flowing, fluted skirts that sweep through powerful passages of movement, to scenes where the stage becomes layered with hay, creating a tactile landscape that dancers throw, wrestle with and explore.
Despite concluding with mortality, The Chronicles leaves the audience uplifted and energised – awed by the beauty of life while reminded of its fleeting nature. It serves as a powerful reflection on the cycles we all share, and a testament to Lake’s ability to create relatable contemporary dance that is both ambitious in scale and deeply human.
By Deborah Searle of Dance Informa.
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