STEPHANIE LAKE’S THE CHRONICLES

DANCE

17 June

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Gracia’s written response to Stephanie Lake Company’s The Chronicles, especially for Fjord Review.

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We are all of us, beings, in a constant state of continual change. We humans are a composition of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. Our bodies are full of other chemical elements too, “heavier elements in lesser quantities, folded into our flesh like gold or rubies hidden in the earth. We are 3.2% nitrogen; 1.5% calcium; 1% phosphorus.” In order of occurrence, we are sulphur for our skin and hair, and sodium for our nerve transmission; we are chlorine, magnesium, and trace elements too. “These elements generally come to us via plants, who find them in the soil. In a very real sense, we are partly made of soil.”[i] At the opening night of Stephanie Lake’s new work, The Chronicles, at the Playhouse in Melbourne, presented as part of Rising Festival, we were in and of the soil, and it glittered with rubies.

The Chronicles, which premiered earlier this year at Sydney Festival, “reminds us that we’re always remaking ourselves.”[ii] With the stage divided horizontally in two, a grassland grew in the top half, and below, in the richness of the fertile soil, the dancers shook the elements within their individual forms. As Rachel Coulson, Tra Mi Dinh, Tyrel Dulvarie, Darci O’Rourke, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Robert Tinning, Jack Ziesing et al. spun and swayed, turned up and over like a series of red proteins responsible for transporting oxygen in the blood, though the clock read one-hour, this regenerative cycle presented as inexhaustible. With arms at shoulder height, extended away from the body, folded at the elbow, to let the forearms and hands dangle, they scuttled upon the balls of their feet. Criss-crossing one another in the dark, this landscape, to me, chronicled both the transportational systems within the body and the soil, disclosing neither system to be still. In a process of change, like compost, death begets life, and so this womb-to-tomb regeneration disclosed a world of wonder. A world which doesn’t shrink as we age, but rather which “appears richer, larger, more splendid” as colours reveal their depth, and trees become “so much more than green [but] black, yellow, red, umber.”[iii]
[i] Emma Marris, ‘Tending Soil’,Emergence Magazine, 8th October, 2019, https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/tending-soil, accessed 13th June, 2025.

[ii] Chloe Hooper, Program Note, “The Chronicles,” https://www.stephanielake.com.au/the-chronicles, accessed 12th June, 2025.

[iii] André Gregory, quoted by Douglas J. Penick in ‘Body’, Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance (New York: Punctum Books, 2025), https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.28526478.4, accessed 13th June, 2025, p.28.