"DanceHouse, in partnership with Lamondance, is pleased to offer a unique workshop opportunity with Stephanie Lake Company (Australia)."
Workshop: Masterclass with Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Georgia Van Gils
When: Friday 17, 2026
Time: 10 to 11:30 pm
Where: Lamondance - 3355 Mountain Highway, North Vancouver, BC, V7K 2H4
Investment: $25 (Cash)
Space is limited
To reserve your space and for more information, Click Here.
Harrison Ritchie-Jones
Harrison Ritchie-Jones is an award-winning choreographer, dancer and film-maker whose work is seen as making waves with his eclectic and unconventional approach to dance. Clashing forms and styles with high technical skill, he's using dance as a frame for absurdity, physical virtuosity and surreal storytelling. Based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, he has presented his works in a diverse range of settings across Australia - from black box theatres to town halls, from white box galleries to nightclubs. As a choreographer, he has been commissioned and/or presented by organisations across Australia, including Lucy Gurerin Inc, Sydney Dance Company, Stephanie Lake Company, Strut & PICA, RISING Festival, Dark MOFO Festival, MONA, Gertrude Contemporary and Melbourne Fringe Festival. Much in demand as a dancer, he has worked regularly with most of Australia's leading choreographers, including Stephanie Lake, Antony Hamilton, Jo Lloyd, Lucy Guerin, Melanie Lane and Alisdair Macindoe. He has won numerous awards and trained at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Georgia Van Gils
Georgia Van Gils is an Australian movement artist, graduating from the New Zealand School of Dance in 2017.
Georgia has collaborated with renowned choreographers and companies across Australia and abroad, including Stephanie Lake Company, Legs On the Wall, STRUT Dance, Co3, The Farm, and Kristina Chan. She performed Hofesh Shechter’s tHE bAD in 2020, Tanja Liedtke’s Construct in 2021 and Crystal Pite’s 10 Duets on a Theme of Rescue in 2023. She joined the Australasian Dance Collective in 2024 and in 2023, was awarded the Inaugural STRUT+CO3 Fellowship. Her interest in movement manifests in a self-practice that experiments with weaving spatial design, audience experience, and theatricality to build new worlds.
MANIFESTO
STEPHANIE LAKE COMPANY (AUSTRALIA)
April 16-18, 2026 | 8pm
Vancouver Playhouse
600 Hamilton Street
Co-presented with Vancouver New Music
Note: This performance contains haze, flashing lights, brief nudity and a loud and dynamic soundtrack.
Nine dancers, nine drummers, thunder unleashed.
Channeling ancient rituals of catharsis, Australia’s Stephanie Lake Company fuses different dance styles to create choreographic fission. A kind of performative ordnance, explosive in its sheer power, Manifesto takes inspiration from the primeval connection between drumming and dancing, combining attack and rhythm, chaos and order to create obliterating dynamism.
In this ‘tattoo to optimism’ musicians and dancers fuse their respective instruments to offer up a collective call for radical joy. Against the backdrop of a towering velvet curtain, Manifesto sets loose a cacophonic wall of sound, grounded in effort and soaring on human energy. Pairing performers into units, the work ratchets up in intensity, adding complex rhythms with choreographic phrases, blurring the lines between cohesion and bedlam into a capering brand of wild rebellion.
Stephanie Lake’s ability to marshal a maelstrom is met by composer Robin Fox, who channels the glittering energies of old time Hollywood extravaganzas. The result is a dance work you feel in your gut, radiating out in lay lines of syncopated rhythm. Composed of heartbeats, breath, and percussive forces building to a cataclysmic crescendo it is a fusion of sound and fury, signifying everything.
This project was originally commissioned by the Australian Government’s Major Festivals Initiative, managed by Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, in association with the Confederation of Australian International Arts Festivals Inc, commissioned by Rising, Adelaide Festival, Brisbane Festival, Perth Festival, and Sydney Festival.
Manifesto has been supported by Creative Victoria, Australia Council for the Arts, City of Moreland, City of Melbourne and Creative Partnerships Australia though Plus 1. Manifesto has also been assisted through the generous support of Canny Quine Foundation, Humanity Foundation, Linda Herd, Chloe Munro AO, Barry and Deborah Conyngham, Michael Kantor, Monica Lim and Konfir Kabo, Anne Runhardt, Ziyin Gantner, Gillian and Ian McDougall, Zoe and Vafa Ferdowsian, James McCaughey, Fiona Sweet, Fiona and Tony Osmond, Jenny Kinder, Carole Lander and Anonymous.
