When most future Australian dancers were in pre-ballet classes, Stephanie Lake was leaping around her family's basement wearing leotards, and roping her siblings into performances for their parents; when the choreographers who are now her peers were graduating to the barre and strapping on their first pointe shoes, she was ice-skating in the prairies of Canada, where she lived until the age of eight.
Even after the family moved to Launceston, Tasmania, it wasn't until Lake's mid-teens that she began taking dance classes, and it wasn't until 19 that she learnt any form of ballet technique.
By dance standards, this made her an extremely late bloomer — and in many ways, a square peg in a relatively round-hole discipline.
"I really was very much a rough diamond," she laughs, speaking to ABC Arts from her home in Melbourne's north.
It lends a certain underdog appeal to Lake's ostensibly stratospheric rise through Australia's contemporary dance scene over the last few years, scooping up awards, commissions and international engagements.
However, the more you look at her pathway — which has taken her from that family basement to scraping her way into a dance degree at Victorian College of the Arts ("They told me afterwards, 'Oh, we had to fight to get you in,'" she says) to becoming a choreographer with her own company — the more it seems her idiosyncratic beginnings have set her up for success.
It's also clear that it's been a long road, marked by setbacks and twists of fate, and punctuated by a three-year "lull" between high school and dance school, and then an extended break from dance in her 20s, to have kids.
"Yeah, it hasn't been a straight line," she reflects.
At 45, success has perhaps come later than some might have expected, but it's no less sweet: this year she premieres three new works (including commissions for Sydney Dance Company and Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre), alongside international seasons of her breakout hit Colossus, a work for 50 dancers that blazed a trail through Melbourne, Sydney and Perth before COVID hit in March 2020, leaving rave reviews in its wake.
In 2023, her exuberant new work Manifesto — an antidote to lockdown life, created during the pandemic and starring nine live drummers and nine dancers — will show as part of Sydney and Perth festivals, before touring Europe; Colossus will have seasons in Switzerland, Canada and Brazil; and she will undertake a commission for a major ballet company (yet to be announced).
Not bad for someone who failed ballet in her third year at Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) after getting a "bare pass" the two years prior, and consequently "had to fight to graduate".
When she talks to ABC Arts, Lake is putting the finishing touches on her new work The Universe Is Here: an ode to lightness and "transcendent beauty" commissioned by Sydney Dance Company and set to open late October.
She recognises a "full circle" moment in returning to the company (which she first choreographed for ten years ago) at this stage of her career.
"My dad was just texting me yesterday, and saying, 'I can remember you seeing Sydney Dance Company for the first time, in Lonnie [Launceston], when it toured' — when it was Graeme Murphy running the company. And he said, 'I remember thinking that that was a significant moment. And look at you now.'"
The first spark
"I think I was always moving — but just for my own pleasure," Lake says of her childhood.
Her first taste of performance was the costumes and choreographed routines of figure-skating — an after-school activity that, around the prairies of Saskatchewan in Canada, was less a bold choice than a natural graduation from ice-skating, she told ABC RN's The Stage Show.
"Everyone did ice-skating … I wasn't particularly good at it."
While she did occasional dance classes (including jazz ballet) as a kid, it wasn't until her mid-teens that the bug bit.
She doesn't recollect the specific Sydney Dance Company performance her dad pinpointed as "a significant moment", but she recalls being exposed to contemporary dance from her early teens through Tasdance (Tasmania's flagship dance company) and the various interstate companies that toured through Launceston.
"That was pretty formative, I think. I was doing casual classes at that time; dance was a hobby, but I'd only just started really."
The turning point for Lake was the arrival of Stompin, Launceston's now-luminary youth dance company, which was founded in 1992 by choreographer Jerril Rechter.
Lake was part of the 1993 intake, and she credits the company and Rechter (who now chairs the board of Stephanie Lake Company) with igniting her passion for dance, describing the years she spent performing with the Stompin as "the beginning of my origin story in contemporary dance".
Stompin also set Lake on her path as a choreographer — a good decade ahead of schedule.
The company's philosophy of fostering co-creation between professionals and young artists gave her the confidence and skills to make work from a young age — setting her apart from most of her peers, who made the shift from dancer to choreographer later in their careers.
"Those shows [by Stompin] just felt so intense and epic, and we were so [much] part of the creation of the works," Lake recalls.
This facility for creation stood her in good stead when she eventually decided to audition for VCA:
"The first portion of the audition was ballet and I was falling all over the place — I could barely do it. But when it got to the improvisation and contemporary parts, I was much more confident."
The apprenticeship
Lake came to the VCA late compared to her peers, and by way of a three-year "lull" after high school.
"I was quite a high achiever in school, I did really well — but [after graduating] I just wasn't convinced of what I wanted to do, or study … I kind of lost confidence," she says.
She worked for a year, in a supermarket deli and a sandwich shop, to save money — then embarked on a year's adventure that took her to Canada, Hungary and Israel.
It was in Israel that she had "an epiphany".
"I remember, distinctly, this feeling of 'Just do the thing that you like doing the most' — it felt so clear and easy — and for me, that was dance," she recalls.
Lake uses the word "epiphany" with a certain wry detachment now: she grew up deeply religious, as part of the Baháʼí faith — and in fact her overseas travel was originally conceived as a 'year of service'; she travelled and performed, for part of the time, with a faith-based dance troupe.
"I'm not that way inclined anymore, but at the time, I think I was maybe more receptive to the idea that things were coming from somewhere on high — that this was some kind of sign for me," she told The Stage Show.
"So it [that moment] was enough to set me on my path, and once I got back to Tasmania, I literally sat on the doorstep of the professional company there, Tasdance, and asked to do an apprenticeship."
It worked: she started off doing admin odd jobs in exchange for classes, and ended up training and understudying with the company — and then performing and touring with them.
"It wasn't a training institution, it was a professional company, it was preparing for shows. So really, I was just thrown in and had to learn by doing and copying," she explains.
She describes this year as "boot camp" — without which she would never have been ready for the VCA audition.
"I had that confidence as a maker of dance, even though it was very embryonic, but what I had to learn was technique and rigour, and the discipline of dance — and just the foundations of ballet, for example, [because] there was no way I was going to get into somewhere like VCA without some ballet experience," she told The Stage Show.
"So I had this year where I just trained and trained and trained."
Earning her stripes
Lake got into VCA by the skin of her teeth, and struggled in her first year: "[It] was really, really difficult. And I wanted to quit all the time," she says.
She has spoken previously of feeling like "a bit of an outsider … a bit of a hippie — I never had the right shoes, my hair would never go into a neat bun, I didn't know any of the ballet language".
Reflecting now, she says: "I learned a lot from all of those ballet classes; it's been a strong influence in my choreographic work. [But] I really resisted [at first]."
"It was very gendered… [and] it just seemed preposterous to me to be learning pointe work, which is the most painful discipline you can ever imagine … I just didn't see any point [because] I was not preparing to be a classical dancer."
In the second year, however, "everything changed."
"It just felt like this whoosh of energy blew into the city," she says.
Lake had landed in Melbourne at a key moment: choreographers including Phillip Adams and Lucy Guerin were returning from New York and founding their own companies, and Chunky Move, Melbourne's flagship contemporary dance company, was in its early years, under the radical leadership of dancer-turned-choreographer Gideon Obarzanek.
Under their influence, Melbourne's contemporary dance scene thrived — and Lake was swept up in it.
When Adams came in to work with the VCA students in second year, Lake made an impression — and scored a role dancing in his 1999 work Amplification (the debut of his now-seminal company BalletLab) before she'd even graduated.
Gigs with Guerin and Chunky Move would follow.
Obarzanek, who went on to work with Lake across 15 years through Chunky Move, has described her as "a dancer of very high fidelity in regards to the detail of movement; but not only that, also is very expressive, and you feel like you see her, she connects with you."
Lake also formed a collective named Trike with fellow students, and started putting on scrappy DIY shows at Melbourne Fringe that sold out and won awards.
"We just wanted to make shows; we just wanted to put stuff in front of audiences," Lake told The Stage Show.
The year she graduated, in 2000, she won Melbourne's Green Room Award for best emerging dance artist, and Trike won the 'festival choice' award at Melbourne Fringe. She was 24.
Forging her own path
By the age of 25, Lake was being described by Melbourne masthead The Age as one of the city's "most in-demand artists", and was a mainstay of Guerin's company, BalletLab and Chunky Move.
"Things were going so incredibly well for me as a dancer," she recalls.
"I was working at a really high level, I was touring and performing a lot … I was getting to work with my heroes and the companies I could only have dreamed of working with."
Then at 26, she became pregnant with her first child, a daughter.
Even now, talking about it, she seems slightly bemused by the timing. The 20s are, after all, prime years for a dancer (as for elite athletes).
"Yeah, it was pretty wild. I felt young," she marvels.
Initially she pressed on with work, continuing to dance until she was seven months pregnant (and on tour), and then returning to the stage when her daughter was just four months old.
"I just kind of thought life would go on as normal. So naive. And of course, that's not realistic," she says.
She had a second daughter within two years of her first, and her focus shifted from dance to parenting.
"There was a big chunk of time where I was pretty absent from the scene … [and] I didn't perform for about three years," she says.
"I had to go through a bit of a grieving process, coming to terms with the fact that probably I wouldn't dance again … that career was in the past."
In hindsight, she realises she lacked role models.
"It's changed a lot now, but at that time, I didn't know women who had kids and were still dancing or making [work] and so I didn't really know how to do it."
It wasn't the end of her career, clearly, but she says "it was a bit of a journey coming back, and it happened very gradually".
Mainstage choreographer
Reflecting on that point in her mid-20s where she shifted from an apparent career high to having children, Lake recognises something else at work.
"I remember feeling around that point in my life: 'OK, what's next?' … like I was ready for the next thing, the next challenge," she says.
"And yeah, I wasn't expecting it to be children — quite so soon — but that's just the way it worked out. And I couldn't be happier and more proud of my daughters; they're central to my life, they're everything."
But Lake was also ready to level up in her career, and when she did return to the dance scene, around 2008, her focus shifted to choreography.
Across 2009 and 2010 she made three works with large groups of non-dancers: a ten-minute 'flash-mob'-style performance for 100 people in Melbourne's Federation Square; another for 400 people in Bourke Street Mall; and a series of 'pop-up' performances around Melbourne's CBD, as part of Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Her breakthrough moment, however, came when Gideon Obarzanek commissioned her to make a full-length work as part of Chunky Move's 2010 Next Move program for emerging choreographers.
At that point Lake had made lots of short works, and one full-length work (back when she was first out of VCA, funded by a grant and presented independently: "We did the whole thing ourselves," she says).
Of the Next Move opportunity, Lake says: "The time was right, I'd been feeling an urge that I wanted to take on something a bit meatier. [Next Move] was the perfect platform for it, because it meant you didn't have to fundraise yourself… and they had the infrastructure to look after all of the stuff around it [the work]: the marketing, the production, the budgeting.
"You could really concentrate on the making of the work."
The result was Mix Tape: a work for four dancers that explored love, and was inspired by conversations on the topic between Lake and various interviewees. The audio of these conversations featured in the work, alongside contemporaneous tracks by Caribou, Jon Hopkins and Gil Scott-Heron, and classics by Bob Dylan and Fleetwood Mac.
"I learned so much making that show, and it set me up for making the next few works after that," Lake reflects.
Mix Tape won the Green Room Award for best choreography. It also put Lake on people's radar: she started to get international interest, and she got her first commission from Sydney Dance Company (Dream Lucid, 2012).
"I felt a sense of arrival as a choreographer at that point. It definitely opened doors for the next things, it was amazing," she says.
It's also how she met her partner in life and work, Robin Fox: a sound and light artist and composer who has collaborated on most of Lake's works in the 12 years since.
Lake and Fox met in the line at Malthouse Theatre cafe, and got chatting ("We got on like a house on fire," she recalls) and he ended up being one of the interviewees for Mix Tape.
"I was not looking for a relationship at that point," Lake says.
"I was absolutely a committed single person, just wanted to raise my daughters and work when and if I could. It was very simple in my mind. But it was just too compelling — we just connected really quickly and really easily."
Working with Fox is also not something Lake planned: she says it happened by accident one day when they were working in adjacent studios and he heard her counting out beats for the dancers, and offered to make her a simple "click track". It ended up with him composing the score for her 2013 work Dual.
Fox's scores have become a distinctive — almost inseparable — part of Lake's aesthetic. She says they collaborate easily, despite being an "unlikely match" creatively.
"I was an admirer of his work for sure, I love his audiovisual work with lasers and the stuff I'd heard him compose for works I'd seen, but he comes from a really hardcore noise background, and I'm into 70s folk music," she says.
"On paper, it doesn't seem like a logical pairing — and we're so opposite in so many ways."
The Colossus effect
In the decade after Mix Tape, Lake racked up high-profile commissions in Australia and abroad, working with Sydney Dance Company, Queensland Ballet, BeijingDance/LDTX and Singapore's Frontier Danceland, among others.
She formed her own company in 2014.
"There was starting to be all of this momentum with my work — it was starting to tour internationally … I was starting to get commissioned by other companies to make larger works. And it was the advice of my producers at the time; they said, 'We really think you should formalise what you're doing,'" she told The Stage Show.
"It seemed ambitious at the time, because I still felt quite junior, I guess, in [some] ways. But I'm really glad we did, because it's been a slow burn.
"It's lots of years of work to get a company to the place where it's a viable concern. And so I'm glad we did it then because … now it's at the point where it's really got legs."
A $160,000 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, awarded in 2013, was crucial to her output in these years, providing funds with 'no strings attached'.
"I really couldn't have kept going if I hadn't got the Sidney Myer fellowship," she told ABC Arts in 2019.
An $80,000 Australia Council Fellowship, awarded in 2017 and spread over two years, was similarly essential: "I literally don't know how I would still be paying my rent [without that]," Lake said.
It enabled another burst of productivity — and the realisation of her most ambitious project to date: a full-length work for 50 dancers, exploring the dynamics of the group and between the group and the individual.
"This is a work I've wanted to make for a really, really long time," Lake told ABC RN's The Hub on Stage in 2018.
"I've always loved the capacity of big casts, and since I was a student, I've always been trying to rope everyone into my works. But for financial reasons, it's not always possible."
Titled Colossus, and cast predominantly with students (from the VCA, Transit Dance and elsewhere), the work was jointly commissioned by Arts Centre Melbourne and Melbourne Fringe Festival, where it opened in 2018.
Dance works of scale have an inherent spectacular appeal, but Colossus also showcased Lake's specific strengths: the themes were primal and accessible to an audience, the movement was meticulous yet also expressive, and the spatial arrangements were so visually striking that they both thrilled and transfixed the viewer.
The reviews were glowing, and the work was picked up by Melbourne Festival for the following year.
In the meantime, Colossus's ripple effect had spread far wider than Lake could have imagined.
"The video trailer for the work [posted on Facebook] went viral overnight, it was really crazy — and so suddenly, the profile of the show was global; there were millions and millions of people who watched that clip and shared it," Lake recalls.
"And of course, that helped to boost the profile of the company and opened a lot of doors."
Colossus has been performed in Taiwan, Germany, Hong Kong and France; in 2021, it was the show with which the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris reopened after lockdown (having been taught to the French dancers over Zoom).
When Lake pitched her follow-up work, Manifesto, to the Major Festivals Initiative (a joint funding pool for Australia's flagship state festivals), five of the seven states signed on, including Adelaide Festival, where the work premiered in March. (Auckland Festival, an 'associate member' of the initiative, also signed on to present Manifesto.)
In January, Stephanie Lake Company, which had hitherto subsisted on one-off grants, individual project fees and commissions, was awarded multi-year organisational funding by Create Victoria ($400,000 over four years).
"It might seem like suddenly I'm making these big works and getting all these opportunities, but this is [the product of] a 25-year career — working as a dancer, working as a freelance artist, working as an independent; slowly, slowly building," Lake reflects.
"But yeah, Colossus was definitely a breakthrough."
The Universe Is Here
Reflecting back on her body of work, Lake sees consistent threads of interest, tied to her childhood growing up surrounded by nature in rural Canada and then "picturesque" Launceston, and her teen years working with Stompin.
"When I was just making stuff on my own body in the early days, I can remember being interested in this duality between things being really organised and rhythmic and meticulous — my 15-year-old version of that — [and] things that were kind of wild and a bit reckless in the body," she says.
"That was there from the very beginning before I could even articulate what it was I was interested in."
Her experience of the Baháʼí faith, with its catchphrase of "unity in diversity" and emphasis on group experience and consultative decision-making, has also clearly been influential.
"I'm obsessed with groups and communal action … that sense of shared experience, and states you create through prayer," Lake told ABC Arts in 2019.
These three threads — communal experience, nature and the order/chaos duality — show up in her new work, The Universe Is Here, made with Sydney Dance Company.
Lake received the commission via a phone call from artistic director Rafael Bonachela during "deep dark lockdown in Melbourne", 2021, when curfews were in place: "We were only allowed to leave the house for an hour a day," she recalls.
"I hadn't done anything dance-wise for such a long time. Everything had been cancelled … I was like, am I even a choreographer anymore?"
Bonachela tasked her with creating something full of light and joy.
"Almost instantly, I saw a harp — which I've never been attracted to before, but it just felt like the emblem of transcendent beauty," Lake recalls.
The Universe Is Here was made with and for 14 dancers, and set to a soundtrack by Robin Fox that combines field recordings of a storm with a mix of live harp music (played on stage, by harpist Emily Granger) and electronic compositions built from harp sounds.
Over 30 minutes, ritualised movement by the group, in unison or in interpolating patterns, gives way to duets both intimate and playful, and exhilarating solos by 'senior' company members Jesse Scales and Chloe Leong.
As with many of her other works, the profane rubs shoulders with the sublime; moments of irreverence jostle with expressions of ritual and ecstasy.
Being brave
To the extent that she has achieved both success and a distinctive choreographic style, Lake credits her unconventional pathway.
"There were lots of downsides to starting late, as you have to catch up a lot, and you're on the backfoot," she says.
"But the upside was, I think, that I had a lot of creative freedom — and I didn't have a whole lot of stuff to undo, or influences that I had to work through, in my early days … or a whole lot of bad teaching [to unlearn]."
In particular, she credits those teenage years at Stompin.
"I'm really grateful that in my early training, when I was starting to dance more seriously as a teenager, I was in situations where I was really encouraged creatively," she explains.
"We were all making pieces and sections of works from a really young age and [were] totally encouraged and empowered to do that — we didn't question it. No one even labelled themselves a choreographer — everyone was just choreographing all the time."
This creative freedom, combined with her lack of 'technique' from prior training, meant she could develop a style more instinctually.
It also bred confidence.
"I felt like I could do it, why not? Anyone could do this. And maybe if I'd started later, I would be much more judgemental of what I was making," she reflects.
"I think if you catch young people at the right age, before they become really self-conscious, or start to feel like they need to label themselves, it's a really good thing."
At 45, she finds herself prizing this sense of 'un-self-consciousness' more than ever.
"As a choreographer, you have to test your idea with other human beings — so it can be a little confronting, because sometimes it's a bit embarrassing if it doesn't work," she admits.
"But I'm trying to be a bit braver and not worry about what the outcome is gonna be; don't worry if it feels like a corny idea.
"You have to trust yourself, back yourself, and keep pushing, and try the things that maybe are going to fail, but that's OK. Just try."
The Universe Is Here is part of Sydney Dance Company's triple bill Resound, showing at Roslyn Packer Theatre until November 5.
Manifesto will show as part of Sydney Festival and Perth Festival in 2023.
