Points of View

From the back of the stage, a single searchlight points in the direction of the audience, and as it does, it sweeps across the forms of seven dancers in Stephanie Lake’s “Seven Days.” The scene is playfully reminiscent of taking a photo of a varnished painting in a museum and finding a reflection has appeared on the surface of your documented image. A tourist halo that you have made in collaboration with a masterpiece, that alters the composition. “Seven Days” revels in the “contrast between classical and contemporary art by pairing the powerful and well-known Goldberg Variations with brand-new choreography to create something truly unique.”[1] The large searchlight blinks, and a new day unfolds.

Performance

The Australian Ballet: “Seven Days” by Stephanie Lake / “Blake Works (The Barre Project)” by William Forsythe / “Glass Pieces“ by Jerome Robbins

Place

Regent Theatre, Melbourne, Australia, September 25, 2025

Words

Gracia Haby

Robyn Hendricks and Maxim Zenin in Jerome Robbins's “Glass Pieces.” Photograph by Kate Longley

Seven dancers, seven days, seven variations, and totality. Together, a week, they make, but not literally so, just as the score is Peter Brikmanis’s reimagining after J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations. To pared back staging, pared back music, space to breathe and interpret each of the seven movements is the focus, and the effect is hypnotic. At the foot of the stage, the dancers lie down. One after the other, they roll over, roll over, like the nursery rhyme. In a physical transference of energy, one by one, they take turns to roll over, roll over in the return direction, drawing a close to a day.

The orchestra, under the direction of guest conductor Charles Barker, click their fingers repeatedly and in doing so extend an “invitation to experience the familiar made strange.”[2] Several members of Orchestra Victoria tease at scrunched up balls of paper to create a crackle. Others blow and whistle, to conjure the sound of a windswept environment. Coupled with the audible breathing of the dancers, and the fragments gleaned of their conversations on stage as they meet in a circle, in the intimacy of Lake’s world premiere, “Seven Days,” I lap up the opportunity to see the great world spin anew.

Elijah Trevitt and Benjamin Garrett in “Seven Days” by Stephanie Lake. Photograph by Kate Longley

Forsythe has shaped his “Blake Works V (The Barre Project)” around the dancers of the Australian Ballet and laid bare a concise work drawn from a broad vocabulary. As the work expands, in accordance with James Blake’s “Buzzard & Kestrel” moving from a non-reverberant space to a cavernous one, before contracting, audibly, but not in scope, Forsythe gives the dancers room to play with pattern and echo. Initially “conceived at the height of the pandemic as an homage to the legions of dancers who, while holding on to any available piece of domestic furniture, attempted to sustain their professional abilities with at-home barre exercises,”[3] it is akin to Virginia Woolf’s “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”[4]: a series of recurring illuminations in the darkness. Thrown into sharp relief, before the central barre, the dancers spark and repeat, spark and repeat. As arms float, winged, suggestive of flight, the movement arc is visible. Like a chalk drawing on a sheet of paper, or the track lines of birds in flight, the stage is a sky of zip ribbons. The dancers move with increased directness, as the intensity steadily builds, before—snap!—ending in a flash of lightening.

Samara Merrick in “Blake Works V (The Barre Project).” Photograph by Kate Longley

In Jerome Robbins’s “Glass Pieces,” performed for the first time by the Australian Ballet, principal couple Robyn Hendricks and Maxim Zenin captivate. As they roll their upper bodies over their legs in a wide, deep fourth position plié, they fold their arms around their torsos. Together, their upper bodies bob up and down, as if in exaggerated, synchronised breath or in water, their bodies responding to the currents around them. Behind them, against a blue backdrop, a line of dancers in silhouette appear as a moving frieze. My eyes leap between Hendricks and Zenin’s pas de deux and the thread of dancers. In profile, knees bent as they progress across the stage, the effect of these two distinct visuals is breathtaking. As every second dancer peels off and moves down the line, resuming their place in the sequence, I am aware that to see it all, similar to Blake’s kestrel, is an impossibility. For though things are pared back in all three works, this rarely means that everything can be seen all at once.

Which is where I land, as I leave the theatre. Yearning to have been able to pause long enough to have seen it all, but aware that this layered and refracted view is also its strength and beauty. Ever changing, ever reinventing itself, a diversity of viewpoints.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

Peter Brikmanis quoted by Heather Bloom, “Back to Bach,” The Australian Ballet’s “Prism” programme, 2025, 33
“Seven Days” synopsis, The Australian Ballet’s “Prism” programme, 2025, 13
Conceived at the height of the pandemic as an homage to the legions of dancers who, while holding on to any available piece of domestic furniture, attempted to sustain their professional abilities with at-home barre exercises.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1927), Part III, Chapter 3, 249

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Points of View

Gracia Haby

footnotes

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comments

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