One thousand dancers descend on Adelaide in ‘kinetic, collective, joyous' celebration

The Guardian

03-03-2025

'As time goes on,' Australian choreographer Stephanie Lake told the Guardian six years ago, 'my ambitions get bigger'. Lake's large-scale works Colossus (2018) and Circle Electric (2024) saw 50 dancers coalesce into seamless wholes, while 2020's Multiply – a filmed response to the Covid-19 pandemic – marshalled 400 participants in Melbourne's Prahran Square.
Lake has scaled up again for MASS MOVEMENT: a one-night collaboration between her eponymous company and the Australian Ballet that sees 1,000 dancers descend on Elder Park/Tarntanya Wama's natural amphitheatre in the Adelaide festival's annual free opening night slot.
The sun is beginning to set but it's still balmy when I arrived half an hour ahead of time on the banks of the River Torrens/Karrawirra Parri. The rotunda on Elder Park/Tarntanya Wama's eastern side, silhouetted against the iridescent blue sky of an idyllic late summer's day, is the vantage point of choice for many. Others file in from the surrounding terraces and Festival Plaza's brutalist sprawl, spreading picnic rugs and beach chairs on the grass. The performance area is fringed with field-marking paint and shin-high rope'; several speaker arrays loom from strategically positioned stands.
There's a buzz in the air, although I sense the audience is sparser than for previous opening weekend offerings (afterwards, the festival gave me an estimate of 6,000 attenders). In the middle of the amphitheatre, nature has convened its own mass movement in the form of a few dozen ducks which are summarily whisked away by a stagehand in head-to-toe black.
A soloist in white singlet and black shorts and sneakers – Yirrganydji, Djirrabul, Kalkadoon and Umpila dancer Tyrel Dulvarie – enters the performance area at a measured pace and begins a slow, gestural choreography. Arms held aloft, he seems to be conjuring something, drawing energy into the space. A sonic blend of ambient washes, martial beats and ethereal choral arrangements begins to flow out and around us courtesy of composer Robin Fox (a frequent collaborator of Lake's – and her partner).
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Hundreds of dancers emerge from seemingly every direction, scything their way through the audience in slow-moving packs that Lake described to me before the show as 'an incredible human flock'. Like Dulvarie, they all wear white tops and black bottoms. As two groups of dancers sweep past where I'm sitting, one pausing briefly to let the other pass like vehicles at a busy intersection, they reveal themselves to be vividly and even movingly heterogenous, their individual differences richly coexisting within the whole.
Erin Fowler, one of 30 'dance leaders' tasked with rehearsing the performers in small groups (and a participant herself), says the dancers span the 'full spectrum' of capabilities – including octogenarians, community line dancers and learning-disabled and neurodivergent members of Tutti Arts – while emphasising that Lake's choreography, though accessible, was never 'dumbed down'.
Gradually, the various groups of dancers converge into a single, monochromatic mass. As the individual dancers' movements synchronise, the effect reminds me of an enormous tai chi class. Collective exhalations of breath add to the feeling of a vast exercise in mindfulness and gentle rehabilitation.
As MASS MOVEMENT progresses, Lake's choreography begins to play with the work's synergistic dynamics. Wave-like patterns of raised arms are strangely mesmerising, as are moments when collective 'ha's' and 'hoo's' ring out, interacting with the amphitheatre's natural acoustics in startling ways. Lake says these, as well as moments when the dancers collectively clap and shout, were designed to surprise and delight the audience – and they do.
Equally enthralling are times when the participants exuberantly gyrate and thrust as Fox's score intensifies and, finally, tails off in the twilight. One of the dancers' final, unisonous sounds is that of laughter. It feels half-rehearsed and half like a spontaneous tribute to the production's spirit – kinetic, collective and joyous.
MASS MOVEMENT took place Saturday 1 March at Elder Park/Tarntanya Wama. Adelaide festival runs until 16 March.