VISTA

There is something about watching bodies move in Carriageworks that makes the building seem even more immovable. The old industrial space has the weight of things built to remain: steel, brick, beams, the long geometry of a place once organised around machinery. Inside it, Stephanie Lake’s dancers have no such obligation. They fall out of one arrangement and into another, pulled by rhythm, by one another, by something that passes through the body before the mind has time to name it.

At first everything is grey.

Six bodies move with extraordinary velocity, gathering into configurations that exist for only the instant required to recognise them before they fracture. An embrace becomes a struggle, a collision becomes a lift, a gesture that seems tender slips somewhere else. Nothing quite holds its shape. The choreography feels less composed than continually composing itself, the dancers seeming to discover the movement as it happens.

Then, after the interval, the work begins again.

Orange. Red. Heat.

The movements return, but not quite as themselves. Something has happened to them in the interval. What seemed formal becomes intimate; what appeared tender becomes difficult to read. The first half lingers inside the second like an afterimage, so that memory becomes part of the choreography. You recognise something without being certain that you are seeing the same thing.

An image returns somewhere else. A harbour becomes a street, a house opens into another house, a familiar person is suddenly someone you cannot quite place. The scene changes without explanation, yet something remains continuous beneath the discontinuity. You know it without knowing what you know.

So it is with the bodies. They gather and separate, become a mass and then a single figure, disappear into one another and emerge changed. A movement is never quite finished before another has already begun. The eye follows, loses, catches up.

Against the permanence of Carriageworks, the dancers seem almost impossibly transient. The building holds its shape while everything inside it is continually becoming something else.

By the end, the orange and red have not simply replaced the grey. The grey is still there, somewhere beneath the colour, moving through it like a remembered place.

Outside, the night has its own fixed architecture.

Inside, nothing stays still.

A vista should open before the eye, giving distance and perspective. Here, the view seems to have no fixed horizon.

Notitia Health – Where the familiar becomes strange, and the image refuses to settle.