Star Dust

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.”[1] 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.

Performance

Stephanie Lake Company: “The Chronicles”

Place

Playhouse, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Australia, June 12, 2025

Words

Gracia Haby

Stephanie Lake Company and the Yarra Voices choir in “The Chronicles” by Stephanie Lake. Photograph by Daniel Boud

“The Chronicles,” which premiered earlier this year at Sydney Festival, “reminds us that we’re always remaking ourselves.”[2] 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.”[3]

So, too, in earth-hued costumes by Harriet Oxley, the colour green is not merely green, it contains those same blacks, yellows, reds, and umbers. It is vibrant acidic limes and blue-based forest tones, and no two costumes—checked, ruched, loose or fitted—are the same, as befits a group of dancers as they marked a path for others in the future. The dancers formed a single central line and took turns to create a movement which the dancer immediately behind them responded to, creating a quick-moving succession of transcendent moves-of-two. With a leg raised high only to quickly snap into a fold and provide a nook for another to shelter, or lightly resting upon the curved form of another, a succession of soft, languid and snappy, charged encounters uncloaked the different sensations occurring under the skin. Though wired together in a daisy chain system, each dancer made manifest how energy courses through their body, as if giving a colour to their strength and gentleness.[4] The overall effect, hypnotic.

Stephanie Lake Company in “The Chronicles” by Stephanie Lake. Photograph by Daniel Boud

Overhead, dressed in white smocks and standing in the long grass, the children’s choir, the Yarra Voices, sang in a round. Each member of the choir held a lantern, illuminating that all colours exist in everything, that everything also being sound. The scene above the earth, in the long grass, with the choir summoning beyond what meets the eye, and below, with the dancers in their writhing line making like a glorious multi-headed worm, making music and the senses visible, together appeared richer, larger, and more splendid. The mezzanine set design by Charles Davis allowed me to fuse the experience, as elsewhere, Robin Fox’s score, and later solo vocalist, Oliver Mann, made organic and pulsating the raw evocation of energy and renewal everlasting. Could this be what soil sounds like, if I, too, were underground?

From tapping the energy within themselves, charting its path as it raced through their limbs, the dancers also reacted to the energy of one another. They altered their course, changed form, and repeatedly threw themselves up high, landing assuredly in the arms of another only to be rocked or swung or catapulted as only the collision of different energies or the sped-up meeting of tectonic plates can. The cyclical repetition and flow within “The Chronicles” was always changing and hopeful in the knowledge that, like the leaping dancers, “once we dissolve back into the soil, we can nurture new life, start a new cycle.”[5]

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

Emma Marris, “Tending Soil,” Emergence Magazine, October 8, 2019, https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/tending-soil, accessed June 13, 2025.
Chloe Hooper, Program Note, “The Chronicles,” https://www.stephanielake.com.au/the-chronicles, accessed June 12, 2025.
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 June 13, 2025, p.28.
Rehearsal footage of the ‘daisy chain’ section, “The Chronicles,” Stephanie Lake Company, https://www.instagram.com/p/C8sunT0Bgsx/, accessed June 13, 2025.
Emma Marris, “Tending Soil,” Emergence Magazine, op cit.

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