The Power of the Many: Stephanie Lake Brings COLOSSUS to London’s Southbank Centre

Stephanie Lake is the most in-demand choreographer in Australia, and until now, British audiences have had to take that on faith. Debuting in the UK on 25 June and running until 27 June at the Southbank Centre, COLOSSUS has already toured 9 countries and been performed by over 850 people, accumulating a reputation that has reached well beyond the contemporary dance world. Its UK premiere at the Southbank Centre, performed by 50 final-year students from London Contemporary Dance School, some might say, is overdue.

Stephanie Lake, COLOSSUS. Image credit: Bryony Jackson.

None have been more confident in the power of Lake’s choreography than the Southbank Centre’s Head of Dance and Performance, Aaron Wright himself, who has wanted to present her choreography since his ‘first day’ on the job. Speaking to New Wave, he outlines his commitment to ‘platforming women choreographers making mainstage work’ as the Southbank Centre considers ‘what it is to be the arts centre of the future’ on its 75th anniversary. Perhaps it is what Wright describes as Stephanie’s ‘very accessible’ and ‘hugely entertaining’ choreographic language that makes Lake the perfect foundation on which to build the future of performance, particularly as inclusivity and ‘creating opportunities for the next generation of performers and artists’ sit at the centre of the Southbank Centre’s ethos.

That commitment extends beyond the stage itself. The production has been opened up to ‘local schools to bring pupils to come over and have their first experience of contemporary dance’, an initiative Wright is particularly excited about. As COLOSSUS makes its UK debut, there is an expectation that ‘the performance will have some of the brilliant, dynamic and feisty energy of London as a city’. Speaking to Lake, it is abundantly clear that this ambition is about to be realised. Yet the choreographer behind this vast collective work arrived at dance by a far less conventional route than many might expect.

Stephanie Lake, COLOSSUS. Image credit: Mark Gambino.

You came to dance late and by your own account only just scraped through your degree. Do you consider yourself an outsider or having an unconventional route into dance and How much does that experience inform a work that is fundamentally about belonging to a collective?

I 100% would consider myself an outsider. I started really late and didn’t necessarily consider dance as a career, but I realised it was my favourite thing to do. There’s an incredible community in dance, and I’ve always wanted to create total inclusivity.

In thinking about COLOSSUS, despite what its name might suggest, it actually started out as quite a humble idea. I just wanted to see how many dancers I could fit on stage. The performance feels really optimistic and energising, and I hope that through this connection with one another we can transcend and that something positive can happen through working together. Over the last eight years, nearly 1,000 dancers have performed the show all over the world. By the time we get to London, we’ll have taken it to around 16 countries. It’s been the most extraordinary and unexpected journey with this piece.

COLOSSUS has been performed by over 850 dancers across nine countries, and yet the choreography never changes. How do you ensure the work stays alive when the steps are fixed, what actually shifts between iterations?

The choreography never changes, but different sections can take on very different qualities in different places. A section that feels menacing somewhere might feel completely abstract elsewhere and there are sections that feel really panicked in one context and really controlled in another. I do think there's a resonance because of the environment it's happening in, but also because of the way dancers train as some are trained to be super obedient and take direction, while others are encouraged to be completely individualistic. So it's always wrestling with those dynamics and finding a place where we can keep the integrity of the piece while also absorbing influences from the culture.

Because you're using dancers from different social contexts, you let them navigate the work and imbue themselves within it. We've had some really interesting situations like in Montreal, for example, it was a collaboration between the ballet institution and the contemporary institution. They'd never had any contact before, even though it's a relatively small city. The cross-pollination, the collaboration and the friendships that bloomed out of that were just beautiful.

We've had lots of experiences like that. In Taiwan there were dancers who only did Chinese cultural dance alongside ballet dancers and contemporary dancers. Again, they'd never crossed paths before, but this project brought them together. There's a whole aspect behind the scenes that goes on in the process of teaching and developing COLOSSUS that's almost another project entirely.

The dancers create themselves within really tight boundaries, there's a section called Matching that's constructed by the dancers in each place where the work is performed where they're given a collective task and have to make choreography within strict structures. There's another section called Gallery where they create all the partnering themselves. So there are moments of invention in the show where it becomes very interpretive and takes on a different flavour in different places.

That always felt important because a work of this size could easily become stale and I wanted it to stay alive as I feel that's the whole point of live performance, that it should remind us that we're alive. Part of that is having new choreography evolve within the piece, but it's mainly about the dancers' experience. Their own movement is in the work, and they have a history with the fellow dancers they've collaborated with to make certain sections.

The work ultimately has to retain its choreographic integrity and it has to be the piece that it is, and I want to share it as it was originally designed. We can't control how an audience interprets something, but over the years I've observed how different cultures and different groups of dancers bring different resonances to the same material.

Stephanie Lake, COLOSSUS. Image credit: Mark Gambino.

A team of you delivers the show and rehearses each new cast of up to 60 dancers. What does that rehearsal process look like, and how long does it take before a group of strangers starts to move like a single organism?

There's a huge amount of preparation that goes on behind the scenes. From the production side of things, negotiating with venues and finding the right partner organisations and dancers, that process probably starts about 18 months before the show hits the stage.

The actual rehearsal process with the dancers, though, is incredibly fast. We do two weeks of intensive rehearsals, and during that time the dancers learn the entire show and create those sections that they contribute themselves and then in the third week, we're performing. It's intended to be an intensive experience with them just doing COLOSSUS all day for those two weeks.

In some places we've extended the process slightly, particularly where translation is needed or there are other logistical considerations. We're actually doing an extra week in London because we're working with the dancers' schedule, which means we can stretch things out a little more. But in most places it's a two-week wham-bam process.

By the time it reaches the stage, it's always ready, but this means it’s also really fresh. There's a practical reason for concentrating rehearsals into the most efficient timeframe possible, but it's quite exhilarating and there's something about the freshness of the piece in the dancers' bodies that I really like, it makes it feel really alive.

The trailer went viral overnight in 2018, did that change your relationship to the work at all, or how audiences came to it expecting something specific?

It did change my relationship to the work in the sense that there was suddenly this 60-second version of COLOSSUS flying around the world and connecting with people and it almost became a whole other work. There was the stage version, and then there was this little video version that people were seeing and sharing.

I hadn't experienced that before, where images from a performance were travelling to places we'd never been. I thought that was so lovely. It felt like a whole other way of sharing performance, and it was wonderful to see people connecting with it and passing it on.

It certainly opened doors for the piece too and I think it contributed to us being able to pitch the show and get it moving around the world because there was already some recognition around it. Maybe presenters felt more confident programming it because there was an audience for it online. I don't know what goes through the minds of presenters, but I'm sure it played some part.

The whole thing was completely unpredictable as it was actually the first video I'd ever posted. True story. I had to text a friend because I didn't know how to upload it. I said, ‘I've got this trailer I want to share,’ and he talked me through it. I posted it, woke up the next morning, and it had something like 20,000 views. At the time, that felt completely insane. Millions came later, but that first moment was such a funny experience.

Mostly, I just remember thinking the whole time how lovely it was that the work was resonating on other continents and that people were getting joy out of it. That being said, the intention is never to create things that glue people to their phones more, the real work is still the live experience of the art.

Stephanie Lake, COLOSSUS. Image credit: Mark Gambino.

COLOSSUS puts around 45 to 60 bodies on stage moving as one, which is a logistically and choreographically enormous undertaking. What does that scale allow you to do that smaller works simply cannot?

When there are that many people on stage, something shifts in the relationship between the performers and the audience. In that initial season in Melbourne, there were around 400 people in the audience and 50 people on stage, so it almost felt like we were all experiencing the work together. There's something about that proximity with those densely packed dancers that I really love as there's a vibration happening between them when they don't have much space but are still achieving all of this expansive movement. There are also all the structural tools a large-scale performance gives you as you can really create this mass when working with patterns, circles, waveforms, lines and canons in a way that's simply not possible when you've only got 6 dancers.

The other thing is the emotional layering that started to emerge, even though it wasn't intended as a narrative work. So many interesting dynamics began to reveal themselves. What happens when a group turns on one person and directs all its attention towards them? What happens when that person is accepted back into the group? How does that affect everyone else? What happens when the group splits in two? It felt like I could say things about society and human relationships that you simply can't say with a small group of people.

My intention is never for the work to tell you exactly what to feel but for it to open up a space where you can feel something or think something, without being told what that should be. That very ambiguity is something I've always loved about contemporary dance.

The show is described as offering a kind of astute commentary on its surroundings. What do you think it will say about London in 2026, performing at the Southbank with a cast of graduating students making their professional debut?

Look, I do hope that people feel uplifted and energised by the show, and that they're inspired by what these young people are doing. It is intentional that the work is performed by a cast of young people on the cusp of their professional careers and the next stage of adulthood. I've always loved that moment in a person's life, and I remember it vividly myself.

There's something about having 50-plus dancers at that stage of life, working together, sweating, creating this amazing work of art and leaving everything on the floor. All of that effort, all of that feeling, and all of that training I just find so incredibly uplifting. It gives me hope, and I ultimately hope it gives the audience a sense of hope as well.

COLOSSUS runs at The Southbank Centre from Thursday 25 June to Saturday 27 June 2026.