ESCALATOR PRESENTED BY STEPHANIE LAKE COMPANY
Recently landed: Stepping Up
Gracia’s written response to ESCALATOR, presented and curated by Stephanie Lake Company, especially for Fjord Review.
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Time to step on the moving staircase once more — ESCALATOR, an evening showcasing new choreographic work curated by the Stephanie Lake Company, in association with the Abbotsford Convent, is back. Having debuted in 2023, it is time for a new group to appear on the circulating belt. Appearing in the 2025 rotation are new works by Alice Dixon, Marni Green, Robert Alejandro Tinning, Thomas Woodman, and Carmen Yih. With them they bring the promise of a burrow, solidarity, risk, reconfiguration, and a reference to Sarah Polley’s 2011 film, Take This Waltz, which, like all things, when shown in a different context, the invitation to interpret and spin it your own way, multiplies the possibilities: “You seem restless, in a kind of permanent way.” Indeed, a wonderful, often playful, restless impermanence seems to permeate the whole escalation, as images malfunction and limbs fold into unforgiving surfaces.
In the Magdalen Laundry and Industrial School, the scene is set, with two rows of seats and stools for the perching, and cushions for crouching, lining either side of the runway stage. Woodman’s cold slow shock, performed also by Woodman, proposes that “risk is often pursued and avoided in the same breath.”[i] Entering from a side door, Woodman appears, an orange electrical cord trailing behind him and an air of having found said cord in “a cupboard out the back.” “This is a 15-metre electrical cord,” he professes. “This is not a 15-metre electrical cord,” he counters, flipping the script, and playing with notions of “sometimes what you see is [not] what you get.” Like a philosophical chair that is not a chair, the found cord becomes a bridge and not a bridge, as Woodman, with the aid of an audience member, raises the cord in the air, diagonally across the stage that isn’t really a stage either. And in that moment, the cord could have become a single chain of nucleotides replete with cold-shock proteins bound to it, and Woodman a manifestation of the cardiorespiratory cold shock response in a health and safety demonstration.
[i] Thomas Woodman, cold slow shock choreographic notes, ESCALATOR 2025, Abbotsford Convent, https://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/escalator-eventprogram, accessed 6th August, 2025.
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9th of August, 2025
