Off Broadway Hub- Eternity Playhouse, Sydney.
3 September 2025.
After its 2024 world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, followed by rave reviews and performances in Adelaide, Suffolk, São Paolo, Lewis Major’s Triptych made its Sydney premiere at the Off-Broadway hub of the Eternity Playhouse as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival. Created in collaboration with Major’s mentor, Russell Maliphant OBE, the work has already earned international praise.
The title suggests a work in three parts, but Major stretches the idea, presenting four distinct movements (the third presented in two acts), each separated by the house lights rising and falling. What links them is not narrative or character, but exquisite attention to form, sensation and, above all, light. Designed by Major with Fausto Brusamolino, the lighting is not simply atmospheric but almost animate: a sculptural presence, shifting architecture, a co-performer. Few works since Gideon Obarzanek’s Mortal Engine have used light with such ingenuity and tangibility.
The first segment in the line up Prologue (music composed by Koki Nakano), is a trio of three women (Elsi Faulks, Rebecca Bassett Graham and Abbey Harby), each situated within a square of light, moved with sweeping arcs and immaculate port de bras, every muscle alive to space. Their stillness carried suspense; their lines were sharpened by the geometric light. The dancers moved in and out of sync, weaving canons and echoes, never stepping beyond their illumination. Just before blackout, the squares brightened in a crescendo – a stunning conclusion.
Unfolding followed, with various duets (Major himself making an appearance, along with Stefaan Morrow and the female cast). At first, they seemed one organism, knotting and flowing as weight passed seamlessly from body to body. Light initiated the work: a single razor-line swept the stage, revealing fragments of dancers as though they hovered in a void. Later, the floor became a shifting canvas of geometric patterns and underwater textures. At its peak, a spinning pyramid of light created optical illusions of dancers floating, slipping further than possible as they slid across the floor, it was delicious extension of the movement manipulated by the light design. The score (Unfolding composed by James Brown) intertwined with the visual design, shadow and sound heightening the sense of suspension and rhythms in the movement. A climactic duet tethered to a moving beam demanded uncanny precision – the dancers orbiting as if gravity itself had been rewritten. Toward the end of Unfolding, two of the women undressed to nude-coloured briefs, their movement broad and open yet never fully exposed, thanks to careful lighting. The two men followed, their weightier, more grounded vocabulary deepening the emotional register. A male solo then filled the stage with haunting, fluid strength.
The Epilogues shifted toward humanistic intimacy, as opposed to the sci-fi movie vibes of the first two movements. In Epilogue: Act 1 – Lament (music composed by A Filetta), a male-female duet (Morrow and Bassett Graham) leaned into connection without prescribing narrative, allowing the audience to draw their own resonances.
The finale Epilogue: Act 2 was unforgettable. A lone male dancer (Morrow), dusted in a flour-like powder, turned and turned, scattering residue into the air until the space was clouded. To a piano solo by Dane Yates after Debussy’s Clair de lune, circles multiplied – of body, flour and light – encompassed the stage space, moving with strength, stability and fluidity that was breathtaking to behold, before a sudden surge of electronic sound recalled the earlier movements and delivered the work to blackout.
Costume throughout was plain black (visual design by Major), shifting only to nude tones for the simulated nudity sequences. This restraint underscored the real costume of the evening: light itself.
Triptych resists story and symbolism, preferring an experience of architecture, atmosphere and embodied rigor. It is cerebral yet visceral, polished yet unafraid of risk. Sydney’s premiere season confirmed what the international audiences already knew: that Major has carved out a voice both distinctive and world-class.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
