It is not often you hear an award-winning, internationally renowned choreographer offer such candid confession. “After a few weeks touring in Europe, I always go back to the farm. It keeps me real, I have to say. It’s good to keep my hands in the dirt and talk to non-arts people.”
Having sprung from a sheep grazing background near the South Australian town of Mount Gambier (famed for its Blue Lake and for being the birthplace of Sir Robert Helpmann), Lewis Major has landed on the main stage of contemporary dance, touring globally and working with the likes of Akram Khan, Aakash Odedra, and Russell Maliphant. He has staged work at Sadler’s Wells and the Royel Opera House in London, and appeared in festivals and fringes from Adelaide to Edinburgh, to Florence, São Paolo and beyond.
By any measure, Major’s farm-to-limelight trajectory is remarkable; yet, despite the heady whirl of travelling and performing, he exudes a singular clarity. Call it humility. Sense of reality. “I’ve got to be able to show my work in the shearing sheds back home,” he quips.
Of all his creations, it is perhaps Triptych that best manifests the seeming dichotomy, the distances real and imagined between regional South Australia and the two-year, 12-country, “over 100” show tour his company has just completed. Following its 2024 Adelaide Fringe opening, the trio of short pieces has sold out theatres and scooped awards. Now, upon its return down under, it is set to play two of the country’s biggest venues, the Sydney Opera House and the Arts Centre Melbourne.
“I wouldn’t say we threw the show together, but we kind of did,” Major concedes with easy frankness. “I don’t want to go on about the precarity of independent dance, but we don’t often get funding, and so we don’t have the resources to make large works. So, we make these shorter works. We have a whole bunch of them in repertoire that we can present at one-off events and festivals. Anyway, a couple of years ago, we thought we’d start sticking them together to try and make a full show; and we did that for [Adelaide] Fringe, and it kind of just exploded.”
From there, with the help of the philanthropic organisation, House of Oz, Triptych was afforded a slot at the famed Edinburgh Fringe. “So, we had a couple of shows and it was then sold out, and it became this big success story for us, and we’ve been touring it ever since.”
Yet, despite this success, the Lewis Major Projects approach remains simple. As he explains, “We keep things very, very lean. It only takes us three hours to get the show in. So, we’ve learnt to do a lot with a little.”
Within the remit of the highly portable, more easily affordable show, the trick is to find the complexity and dynamism to keep both audience and creators engaged. Part of that, for Major, is never settling. By his own admission, he is a ‘tweaker.’
“When we do these long runs, like, if you get a three-week season, I’ll be tweaking the lights within a millisecond every night,” he reveals. “I don’t think that’s wasted time or energy; but you do need to know whether you’re tweaking because you’re bored, or if it’s really finessing.”
Having spent so long on the one work, the creative challenge is to stay fresh; to avoid rote. For those in the contemporary dance scene in Australia, however, this is not usually an issue, as most seasons are short and the vast majority of work never tours. However, for Major, the remount is not such a rarity. Having quit ballet school for a gig in Vienna, he then spent more than a decade in Europe, where touring, and the logistics of such, are more common.
Elaborating, he says, “You’ve got to make show fees because the funding doesn’t even cover your overheads. So you’ve got to be selling shows, especially internationally. I always found it odd when I came back to Australia, where you might spend two years getting a show up and, if you’re lucky, might get half a dozen nights and another show in another city, perhaps.”
Of the artistic energy required to keep a show bubbling across a multi-year stretch, Major is once again disarmingly honest. “I become very disinterested in things very quickly, but with Triptych it’s a bit different…Dance is ephemeral. It doesn’t exist as a show. It’s only there when the audience is in front of it. So, um, I would probably prefer it if I could let it go, but…”
All of which brings us back to the beginning. Reflecting on the evolution of his hit trilogy, he recalls, “It’s quite serendipitous the way it came about. I mean, the show comprises three works, Prologue, Unfolding and Epilogue, and that was not planned. It worked almost too well, but actually it all just kind of accrued.”
If that seems vague, it mirrors Major’s thoughts about his practise. “There’s this quote: all art is an argument. In other words, an argument about what is worth looking at, or how to look at the world. So, I don’t make antagonistic or didactic work. We’re not trying to tell you what to think, or feel, more importantly.”
Back home in the shearing sheds, it may well be this freedom of interpretation, of experiencing, that would allow a work like Triptych to be applauded as heartily by farm hands as by the cognoscenti of Europe or the arts crowd in Melbourne and Sydney.
Lewis Major Projects will present Triptych at the Sydney Opera House from 16 – 19 September, and at Arts Centre Melbourne from 22 – 26 September.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
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