A night in the theatre is an opportunity for brilliance, to see and experience a live performance amongst an auditorium of people, breathing, watching and taking in a piece of art all at the same time.

For acclaimed Australian choreographer Stephanie Lake, William Forsythe’s Eidos: Telos, a work she saw at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, encapsulated this. It is a show that still lives vividly with her. “There was this woman just writhing to these huge, big bass sounds and horns, ripping her clothes off. The curtain came down and I just burst into tears, and I didn’t really understand why.” The performance, she says, “just ripped me.”

You might call this a moment of awakening for the Canadian-born choreographer, who at the time had just graduated with a Bachelor of Dance from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). She would go on to build one of the most impressive resumes in Australian choreography, spanning an Artist in Residence position at Semperoper Ballet, world tours with her own company, Stephanie Lake Company and, despite failing her third year of ballet, an appointment as Resident Choreographer of the Australian Ballet in 2024.

Lake picked up dance, unlike most, in her late teens — a mark of difference that has followed her career. Perhaps that bravery, the willingness to embrace the artist’s unknown, traces back to the charming fact that she was born in the same hospital as the great Joni Mitchell in Fort Macleod, Alberta. She didn’t deny the kinship.

“I think she’s a genius,” she tells me. She once learned that Mitchell was self-taught on guitar, “and so she ended up almost making up chords, making up the fingering, and that led to these really unusual patterns.” Lake, in much the same way, has always carried that self-taught spirit herself.

Because, like most artists, hers has not been a career without its fair share of “forks in the road”. She recalls feeling “totally self-indulgent” early on, fuelled by constantly having to look at herself in the mirror at school, wondering, “What am I, and what am I doing?”

“I felt like I needed to go and work for the UN or something. I’ve got to do something useful for humanity,” she says.

But a friend who was, in fact, working at the UN quickly dissuaded her, telling her that the industry, although free from the perils that come with an artist’s life, was “full of terrible people, careerists on a totally different ego trip themselves.”

And so, she persisted.