“I recorded the electric kettle in every hotel room I stayed in,” he says. The build up, the boiling, the clicking off, he recorded it all on his portable zoom recorder. “I must have recorded like 20 or 30 of these things and then put them into one session and just lined them all up and that makes up one of the tracks in the piece.”
The piece he is referring to is his latest collaboration with choreographer Stephanie Fox. A dance work called A Small Prometheus, which has its world premiere next Tuesday at the North Melbourne Town Hall as part of the Melbourne Festival.
Heat, or more specifically, fire, first sparked the idea several years ago. Fox had been in Adelaide’s German village Hahndorf. “There was this German Christmas cake with this little thing on top of it where you light a candle and it turns a little propeller and I thought ‘that’s beautiful’” he recalls. A couple of weeks later, he saw Lake’s Mix Tape (her highly acclaimed dance work that was commissioned by Chunky Move and won two Green Room Awards) which ended with one of the characters coming on stage carrying a tray of candles. “Just a simple stage thing, but it was beautiful light and I made this connection in my mind between that image on stage and then that thing in the Adelaide Hills and I thought ‘one day I’m going to make a work with Stephanie that uses fire powered kinetic sculptures’. I had that revelation at that time, and then three years later it’s happening,” he says.
The sculptures Fox designed hold candles the dancers will light at the start of the show. “The convection of the heat rising from these candles turn almost like a propeller or a fan, and attached to that fan is like a little tine which then hits metal objects and makes sound. So it turns and becomes this kind of organic sequencer, like a loop player,” he says.“Then once they’re kinetic sculptures they exist on their own and then the dance almost comes out of them.”
Fox and Lake, who are a couple, worked together on Lake’s Dual earlier this year, which premiered in Dance Massive 2013 and toured to Dublin Dance Festival in May, also picking up a 2013 Helpmann Award nomination for Best Choreography. There’s another collaboration with Chunky Move coming up in November plus some smaller works along the way, but A Small Prometheus marks the first time they have shared the creative responsibility.
“This is the first one we’re in a co-director relationship. Usually she’s been the choreographer and it’s been her work and I’ve been making the sound or lighting design. But in this work we’re co-directing so we’re making all the dramaturgical decisions together,” says Fox.
“It’s going really well,” says Lake on a break from rehearsals with the five dancers. Since that first inspiration in Adelaide, the work has evolved considerably. “The atmosphere of the work wasn’t something we intended to create. It’s ended up being quite intense and dramatic and I don’t think either of us intended for that to happen,” she says.
The title, while referencing the Greek myth of Prometheus (a fairly gruesome tale in which a Titan is chained to a rock and has his liver gnawed daily by a vulture as punishment for stealing fire), doesn’t reflect the content of the show. “It’s certainly not a representation of the story by any means. It’s really just a reference to that myth in the title and some of the elements of the story have acted as triggers or starting points for creation, but really, other than that, it’s very much a non-literal, non-narrative work,” explains Lake.
Despite that though, is there anything she’s wanting to communicate with A Small Prometheus? “I always think I’m communicating something particular but the audience makes up its own mind,” she says. “I’m always surprised by the different interpretations that emerge, even if you think you’ve been completely obvious it’s often not the case. That’s something I really like about dance work and live work. So as much as I have tried to construct things and shape things so they have a particular emotional logic, some kind of through-line, I’m sure everyone will come to their own conclusions about what that means”.
BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD
