Interview: Mob behaviour and control hit the South Bank in Stephanie Lake’s Colossus
The UK premiere of Stephanie Lake’s Colossus takes place tomorrow, 25 June and can be seen until Saturday 27 June at the Southbank Centre‘s Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.
The Australian choreographer Stephanie Lake “explores relationships between the individual and the collective” with a cast of 50 final year students from London Contemporary Dance School at The Place.
Since its debut in Melbourne in 2018, Colossus has travelled the world with a small creative team of five or six people who work with 50 or so local dancers for two weeks to prepare the piece. The ensemble acts as a unified, breathing entity. Solo moments sometimes emerge but are quickly absorbed back into the group. While the choreography stays consistent, each version subtly changes based on its environment.
Graham Watts talked with choreographer Stephanie Lake.
It seems only a matter of time before the Melbourne-based choreographer, Stephanie Lake, gets to direct an Olympic Games Opening Ceremony or similar, since she has an extremely rare capacity for creating movement from a mass of bodies that is both organic and spectacular. Lake’s large-scale public works include choreographing 400 participants in Multiply, performed in Melbourne’s Prahran Square in November 2020 as a response to social isolation.
Lake had already taken her monumental scale into theatres with Colossus, a dance extravaganza for at least 50 performers, which premiered in her home city in September 2018 and will make its UK debut at London’s South Bank Centre from 25-27 June.
I spoke to Lake in September 2021, whilst she was in lockdown in her Melbourne apartment, prior to a performance of Colossus at the Hong Kong International Festival, which was delayed by a year due to Covid restrictions. She told me that her inspiration for the work was two-fold: “It is about human nature and how people operate in close proximity to each other, the push and pull of society and the beauty and ugliness of crowd behaviour,” she explained. “It is also a macro thing, looking at the grand cycles of nature, the patterns in the natural world, and seeing human beings as part of that.”
The essence of Colossus lies in the relationship between individuals and a mass. “There is an interesting flux during the piece where the group unifies with things happening through that strength in numbers,” explained Lake. “But then an individual takes an action that steers the group in a new direction, and the mass either turns on them or joins in. Sometimes the mass is that beautiful flock of birds, or they are all leaves on one tree, but at other times an individual figure stands out, and it was important to me that the audience connects with the human beings within Colossus and they become more than just abstract forms. It can be watched many times, and people will always see different things in the work.”
The number of dancers in Colossus is not fixed, and it has been performed with any number from 42 up to 57, and 50 dancers are planned to take the stage at the South Bank. With so many performers, Lake’s only practical means of developing Colossus was in partnership with training institutions in Australia and France. “That was the only way I was able to make it, but it has always been a really heightened experience,” Lake recalled. For the Hong Kong Arts Festival, Lake collaborated with the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and the South Bank performances are a similar collaboration with London Contemporary Dance School.
Speaking ahead of the Hong Kong performances, Lake relished the challenge of working with different young ensembles: “It’s a beautiful thing because Colossus takes on so much personality from individual dancers in the show. I don’t want it to be a cookie-cutter replication every time. I love that unpredictability of different interactions with the dancers because it is not controllable.”
“It can be expanded or contracted,” explained Lake. “I want flexibility to ensure that the stage feels intensely full and the work has the greatest impact. It can squeeze and grow, and there is room for everyone.” Lake’s ethos is for the piece to be inclusive, engaging dancers who are at the beginning of their training with others who are more experienced.
Lockdown restrictions in Australia meant that Lake could not attend the European premiere of Colossus at the Théâtre Chaillot in Paris in June 2021. Speaking a few months later, Lake told me: “I was able to Zoom in for the premiere with my cappuccino in the middle of the night, and it was still amazing! They projected me on the screen so I could take a bow from my home. It was special, and that success has meant that we have become very open-minded, and we know that we can do this remotely with the right screen set-up in the studios and with a great team there on the ground.” Hopefully, this UK premiere will not have required such hands-off coaching and rehearsal, and Lake can be present to enjoy the experience.
Stephanie Lake: COLOSSUS (UK Premiere)
Thu 25 – Sat 27 June 2026
Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall
A co-production with London Contemporary Dance School at The Place and the Southbank Centre.
Note: this feature has been adapted from an interview with Stephanie Lake in September 2021, ahead of a performance of Colossus at the Hong Kong International Festival in August 2022.
Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA). He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.
He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv. He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.
