ÉTUDES/CIRCLE ELECTRIC
Recently landed: Hidden Worlds
Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s double bill Études and Circle Electric, especially for Fjord Review.
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When Robert Hooke revealed the detailed workings of a single flea writ large on the page, in Micrographia (1665)[i], his translation of scale, from dot to a foldout copperplate engraving, was, and remains, awe-inspiring and accurate. In translating what he saw through the lens of a microscope, the unimaginable appeared, and left no room for particulars to hide. Just as Micrographia’s full title is some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries thereupon, in some ways the same could be extended to fit Stephanie Lake’s new work, Circle Electric, commissioned by The Australian Ballet. Circle Electric makes a magnifying glass of the stage, and places different dancers in different configurations in the spotlight with the intention of observing them and thereupon making inquiries. And while the dancers are not specimens, per se, like the famous flea, the ant, or the louse, they do show hidden worlds and marvels. Hidden worlds and marvels which earlier in the year had their world premiere in Sydney, and now, at last, their Melbourne premiere at the Regent Theatre, shown alongside Harald Lander’s Études, last presented by the company in 2012.
Looking at Hooke’s documented patterns that a piece of petrified wood makes, in comparison to that of frozen matter, or the honeycomb like units that make up the structure of cork, is akin to looking at my imagined choreographic floorplan for Circle Electric, where dancers shake into new formations like blight on a rose leaf.[ii] Huddling in groups not organised by height, but governed by a different rule, the perimeter of a large, illuminated ring, the effect is magnetic. With set design by Charles Davis, and lighting design by Bosco Shaw, this ring contains the dancers, until they skitter free, only to be slid, sometimes literally, back under the intense glare of the microscope. The dancers, presenting as a biological system of molecules, grow and disassemble, moving as one mass, ever dividing and colliding. Circle Electric begins as a “microscopic investigation of the intricate and the intimate” before, like Hooke’s flea, revealing the bigger picture, “expanding to encompass a telescopic view of humanity,” in Lake’s first one-act work as resident choreographer with the Australian Ballet.[iii]
[i] Copperplate engravings from a recently conserved first edition of Hooke’s Micrographia, https://pictures.royalsociety.org/pro254, The Royal Society, UK, accessed 3rd October, 2024.
[ii] Which incidentally, befittingly led to Hooke coining the biological term “cell”.
[iii] Circle Electric synopsis, The Australian Ballet Études/Circle Electric Sydney and Melbourne 2024 program, p. 14.
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10th of October 2024
The Australian Ballet in Circle Electric by Stephanie Lake (image credit: Kate Longley)
