The concept is straightforward. Bring together nine dancers and nine drummers, and put them all on stage to do what they clearly love: making dance and making music. And it’s enough: Manifesto, by Australia’s Stephanie Lake Company, is a friendly hour-long showcase for 18 performers that made a lively finale to the DanceHouse season at the Vancouver Playhouse April 16-18.
The warm, engaging space in which choreographer Stephanie Lake and composer Robin Fox set their music and dance is key. Bosco Shaw’s lighting is for the most part bright and optimistic, letting us really see the individual performers. Not just the dancers, but—a rare treat on the dance stage—the musicians as well, who sit behind drum kits, placed upstage in a row on a raised platform. Pink curtains are draped behind them and decorate the platform, creating a 1940s dancehall effect. Through this vintage aesthetic, designer Charles Davis establishes an entertaining, not a high-art, space.
Stephanie Lake Company performs Manifesto. Photo: Roy VanDerVegt
The dancers (all in white), with a range of contemporary training and performance experience, are enthusiastic movers who high kick and spin, flip mid-air and leap like exploding firecrackers. The drummers (all in black) are also an individual lot, with Fox himself among them.
The teamwork from both sides was very fine, with a standout section from the drummers when a spotlight moves slowly across the line of men and women—a line that fills the width of the Playhouse stage—stopping to highlight each one in turn as they break into a brief burst of virtuosic drumming, one solo after another. Then the spotlight returns, passing back down the line, up and down again and again. The timing of sound and light was impeccable, the scene electrifying.
Lake and Fox are longstanding collaborators (and also life partners), both well-respected in their fields. Fox is an audio-visual artist and composer known for his laser spectacles at major venues around the world. Lake is currently resident choreographer for The Australian Ballet and also an artist-in-residence at Germany’s Semperoper Ballett. While Lake’s company is based in Melbourne (Naarm), it tours widely. Currently, besides bringing Manifesto to North America, Lake’s much-toured 2018 Colossus (music by Fox) will be in London this June, performed by 60 graduating dancers from London Contemporary Dance School.
Stephanie Lake Company performs Manifesto. Photo: Roy VanDerVegt
Lake, who grew up in Saskatoon until age eight, when the family moved to Tasmania, likes to think big. In 2025, the Adelaide Festival presented Lake’s MASS MOVEMENT, with a huge cast of 1,000 professionals and volunteers. Although the grandly titled Manifesto (2022) is a much smaller work in terms of numbers, touring with a cast of 18 is no small feat. And Manifesto certainly has, at times, a large-scale wall of sound.
The ensemble work of both drummers and dancers is exciting, but much of Manifesto’s pleasure comes from the performers’s individuality. Not so much in the opening, when the dancers worked hard to appear friendly and engaging in several moments of too-cute whimsy. Once everyone settled into the matter at hand—the relationship between dance and drum—they were fed by the piece’s deeper creative pulse.
Stephanie Lake Company performs Manifesto. Photo: Roy VanDerVegt
In Manifesto’s finely tuned scenarios, first one form leads, and then the other has a turn, sometimes obviously, as when a dancer conducts, but often so dynamically it seems as if the dancing and drumming are one. By evening’s end, when the stage explodes with action—and some measure of zaniness—Manifesto radiated pure happiness.
For more on the DanceHouse 2026-27 in Vancouver, visit www.dancehouse.ca
