‘I didn’t expect to be talking about your dog’s pre-funeral party,’ says dancer Stefaan Morrow, sitting across from me, some way into the preliminary chat that takes place before each individual performance of Lien. ‘But that’s the beauty of this piece.’ The one-on-one dance performances were conceived by Australian choreographer Lewis Major in response to pandemic social distancing. The resonance however, of sharing intimate space with a stranger, within such carefully held boundaries, is something that transcends covid times. 

Morrow asks me first if I am nervous (I am), if it’s my first time having a one-on-one dance performance (it is) and then to consider a moment in my life I’d like to return to (which is where we come to my dog’s pre-funeral goodbye party). He then performs an elegiac, achingly beautiful dance to a thoughtful, melancholic score. It’s impossible not to connect the grace and beauty unfolding in front of you to the thoughts just stirred up by the pre-dance conversation. Lien manages to feel both universal and deeply personal; it’s an extremely rare and special piece of dance, like watching a poem write itself. 

You can trace a choreographic thread from Lien into Major’s larger scale work, Triptych. Performed by four dancers, and split into three parts, the delicacy and power of the body in motion is a theme that runs throughout. The first piece ‘Two x Three’ was created by Major’s mentor, Russell Maliphant. Three spotlit dancers swoop and whirl, their helicopter arms becoming blurs in golden pyramids of light.

‘Unfolding’, though only around 30 minutes long, has an epic feel. The dancers are bathed in Fausto Brusamolino’s overhead lighting projections, entrapping them in dizzying digital universes. One minute they’re drenched in waves that spread out into hexagons on the floor, the next limbering in combat while the stage appears to spin. It’s an extraordinary effect, brilliantly executed, and exhilarating when one dancer looks as if she is balancing on a swirling tightrope. But the most beautiful moment comes when two dancers lie entwined; covered in pinprick lights, they look lost in the centre of a galaxy. 

To close the triple bill, Major’s ‘Epilogue’ is a haunting, tender solo. Clementine Benson, covered in chalk dust, turns slow pirouettes to Dane Yates’ arrangements of Debussy and Sakamoto. As the dust gradually falls from her, her body becomes more lithe and limber; it’s like watching a ghost return to life. 

Lewis Major: Lien, 11, 13, 18, 21–25 August, times vary; Lewis Major: Triptych, until 25 August, 9.40pm; both events at Assembly @ Dance Base; main picture: Chris Herzfeld.