Stephanie Lake Company

Venue: Vancouver Playhouse

DanceHouse presents Stephanie Lake Company: Manifesto

Co-presented with Vancouver New Music 

Nine dancers, nine drummers, thunder unleashed. 

Channeling ancient rituals of catharsis, Australia’s Stephanie Lake Company fuses different dance styles to create choreographic fission. A kind of performative ordnance, explosive in its sheer power, Manifesto takes inspiration from the primeval connection between drumming and dancing, combining attack and rhythm, chaos and order to create obliterating dynamism.  

In this ‘tattoo to optimism’ musicians and dancers fuse their respective instruments to offer up a collective call for radical joy. Against the backdrop of a towering velvet curtain, Manifesto sets loose a cacophonic wall of sound, grounded in effort and soaring on human energy. Pairing performers into units, the work ratchets up in intensity, adding complex rhythms with choreographic phrases, blurring the lines between cohesion and bedlam into a capering brand of wild rebellion. 

Stephanie Lake’s ability to marshal a maelstrom is met by composer Robin Fox, who channels the glittering energies of old time Hollywood extravaganzas. The result is a dance work you feel in your gut, radiating out in lay lines of syncopated rhythm. Composed of heartbeats, breath, and percussive forces building to a cataclysmic crescendo it is a fusion of sound and fury, signifying everything.