The Art of Becoming with Jack Lister

Like the productions he creates, Jack Lister is three things: enigmatic, polished, and intentional. He is both artist and observer, subject and spectator; his innate polarity creates a unique, yet candidly earnest, profile. For Brisbane audiences, Lister is a known secret. His transition from company dancer to choreographer has had a steady but tangible impact on the local mainstage. Now, as Associate Artistic Director of Australasian Dance Collective, this impact has the potential to be tenfold—an increase that would be both readily welcomed and well-earned.

Annabelle McCoy and Taron Geyl in “Papillon” by Jack Lister. Photograph by David Kelly

After creating “Memory House” for Queensland Ballet in 2015, Lister quickly established his name as an emerging talent to watch. He has straddled both the balletic and contemporary fields with ease, staging various works that experiment with form, structure, and content. “Aftermath,” for example, was a festival favourite. A co-creation with ADC’s Artistic Director, Amy Hollingsworth, and Danny Harley from the Kite String Tangle, the piece played with movement and music through a landscape of fragmented memories. “Halcyon,” as well, was Lister’s first foray into choreo-directing an immersive performance. The intertextual whodunit drew heavily on film noir aesthetics, and further entrenched ADC’s growing prominence in the immersive space.

Internationally, Lister’s reputation has also developed over the past five years. In 2019, he created “A Brief Nostalgia” for Birmingham Royal Ballet which was staged at both the Birmingham Hippodrome and Sadler’s Wells Theatre. In the same year, Lister was also a finalist in the Beijing International Ballet and Choreographic Competition. More recently, Queensland Ballet performed “Perfect Strangers” as a part of the Royal Ballet and Opera’s 2022 Next Generation Festival and, in 2024, Milwaukee Ballet premiered his “Mr Sheen.” It is only a matter of time before Lister’s international demand outweighs the local one, but we (this author included) will readily consume all we can until then.

Fjord caught up with Lister one morning over coffee to talk through a few formative moments from his career thus far.

Jack Lister. Photograph by Jade Ferguson

In terms of transitioning from Creative Associate with Australasian Dance Collective to, now, its Associate Artistic Director, how is all that going?

It’s definitely less a transition and more just me wearing a lot of hats—I’m still dancing full-time, choreographing productions for ADC and Queensland Ballet and elsewhere when I can take on invitations. I’ve been working with Amy [Hollingsworth] for almost ten years, first at Queensland Ballet where she was the Creative Associate and I was still a dancer, and now alongside her at ADC. She created this role for me, and it was [less a traditional stepping stone] and more just us fortifying the congruent relationship that we’ve built together.

Sorry, I didn’t realise you were still jugging full-time dancing as well!

Yes, I think that’s just part of being with a small but mighty organisation like ADC. There are six of us [dancers] which is both a blessing and a curse at times. It’s great to still be in the room with everyone but there is a lot on my plate, and something is going to have to start sliding soon. But I definitely don’t feel like I’m done dancing yet; I’m only thirty, and do want to keep honing my time a little more to fit everything in. If my high school self could see me now, he’d be like “you’re doing everything you could have dreamed of doing.” So, for the moment at least, I’m very much a “yes” person and am lucky to be surrounded by a lot of very good supportive people to help me.

When you approach working with ADC and Queensland Ballet, then, how do you juggle jumping between those balletic and contemporary spaces?

I’ve always had a bit of a strange relationship with ballet as an artist. There is this mental block I have, sometimes, in thinking that I’m not a classicist. If I had just let myself be, I probably could have very much enjoyed a purely straight ballet career, but equally, I quite enjoy the creative space and the lack of structure that comes with the [contemporary] domain. When the offer to come over to ADC was put on the table, it came with the caveat that I had a lot to learn. But I took it, and it felt like a fresh start shifting across. I still have a solid creative relationship with Queensland Ballet and have made something for the company at least once a year for almost ten years.

Jack Lister in “Salamander.” Photograph by Justin Nicholas

Yes, I saw “Papillon” earlier this year, and it was incredible what you created with those young artists. How was it working exclusively with the company’s apprentices?

I do like working with younger dancers because they have no preconceptions of themselves or the process. They have an innate hunger but not in a way that’s immature; they’re not pushing [themselves] because they’re working for a choreographer in a company setting, there is just a genuine interest in finding something new. We made “Papillon” in the first four weeks of them being young artists in the company, and I was asking them to do different things and realised that “oh my god, there are some superstars in here.” Quite a number of them could just [adapt] to my proclivities in terms of rhythm and style and hold themselves in that space with an amazing level of maturity.

And what was that devising process like for you? Did you rely on improvisation to begin those conversations with the dancers?

I actually rarely use improvisation itself and am pretty structured with task setting. We also have a different understanding in relation to improvisation as contemporary dancers [compared to] ballet dancers. For the pressure cooker [that is a classical company], you have to go from nothing to a product in such a short amount of time, and I’m too specific to go and just improvise something. I care about what that [specific] thing is and have been working a lot with rhythm, numbers, and texts as generators recently. Which by no means breaks any boundaries, but I’m just able to bring up a lot of content quite quickly.

Especially in a contemporary dance setting, a lot of the time, there’s this heavy reliance on us as artists to create the show. Sometimes there is this feeling that “I’ve got to encapsulate the whole concept about the weight of the world in this solo or this movement”, and for me now, it’s not about that. It’s about zooming out and concentrating on everything that surrounds that movement. I’m interested in seeing a Rubik's cube in a body—just encouraging [the dancers] to lean into the throwaway nature of creation and give me moves on moves on moves to see where it lands.

When thinking about your collaborative process, then, on a more macro level, how does your work with different composers factor in?

For “Papillon” I worked with Louis [Frere-Harvey], and we have a really nice working relationship. He loves being in the studio with people, and it almost adds this extra layer of texture to the piece. His scope of talent is amazing, and I get so much creative feedback that way as opposed to just responding to a piece of music that I’ve found. Other composers work more in the periphery; it just depends on the person.

For “Aftermath,” I worked with Danny Harley from the Kite String Tangle. We had six shows and this absolutely banger crowd because half of them were there to see Danny or had this preconceived idea of seeing Danny from Kite String Tangle. He made such a departure from what people understood him for, and made this dirty, juicy, Berlin-basement score with some beautiful moments. The show was also built for the Powerhouse Theatre which meant that the sub[woofers] were under the seats so it felt like the sound was engulfing you.

Australasian Dance Collective in “Halcyon” by Jack Lister. Photograph by David Kelly

In terms of experimenting with different kinds of theatre as well, how does something like an immersive performance change your practice? Because that is a completely separate entity.

It’s a whole different thing. “Halcyon” was my first foray into the immersive genre and the largest show that I’ve done. We had six to eight weeks to make the whole thing and between that, we were also staging “Lucie and the Sky” and “Salamander” and the same time. It was tricking in terms of splitting my brain [between the productions] but “Halcyon” had such a strong aesthetic. I was building it straight out of the films [it references] and using texts in scenes to draw up ideas to mess with.

Immersive is weird, though . . . you never know how an audience is going to respond. At one show, they stood stationary in a circle for an hour and twenty minutes; hardly anyone moved. At the next one, it was like a club and people were running around, physically responding to us. I kept asking if this was just indicative of an opening night crowd? Or does a younger Saturday night crowd who might not prescribe to the same [theatre] rules have anything to do with it? It’s kind of great and unexpected, and I really like the unpredictability of it.

Do you think you’d like to dabble in that genre again?

Yes, actually, it’s one of the projects I’m working on for ADC at the moment. As a patron, I don’t like audience interaction at all but I love proximity. I like to walk up to something and feel like I’m in a gallery and can visually interrogate what I’m looking at. Those great immersive productions like “Sleep No More” by Punchdrunk have had so much consideration, and I’m not yet at the point where I have the time to test audience interaction to that level, but I like to challenge myself in that space and get audiences moving.

In 2025, Brisbane audiences will be able to readily consume two new Lister pieces. ADC is premiering “Relic,” a site-specific immersive production in collaboration with Urban Art Projects. Queensland Ballet has also programmed a new Lister work as a part of its triple bill which sees the return of Frere-Harvey as composer and Alexander Berlage as lighting designer.

Madelyn Coupe

Madelyn is a dramaturg and former ballerina based in Brisbane. She holds a BA (Honours) in Drama and is currently undertaking postgraduate study specialising in Classical Ballet Dramaturgy.

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