POINTS OF VIEW
Recently landed: Points of View
Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Prism, especially for Fjord Review.
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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.”[i] The large searchlight blinks, and a new day unfolds.
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.”[ii] 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.
[i] Peter Brikmanis quoted by Heather Bloom, ‘Back to Bach’, The Australian Ballet’s Prism programme, 2025, p. 33.
[ii] Seven Days synopsis, The Australian Ballet’s Prism programme, 2025, p. 13.
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3rd of October, 2025
Lilla Harvey, Adam Elmes, Elijah Trevitt, Callum Linnane, Benjamin Garrett, and Yaru Xu, holding Samara Merrick in Seven Days by Stephanie Lake (image credit: Kate Longley)
