Watching Melbourne-based dance company Chunky Move perform Anthony Hamilton’s Keep Everything at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in July, I could not peel my eyes away from dancer Lauren Langlois. She had a manic, magnetic stage presence. More than anything I wanted to interview her, to find out what makes that dynamo go. Langlois kindly agreed to chat to me between the Saturday matinee and evening performances.
In Keep Everything Langlois comes across as a loose canon, full of bubbling, unpredictable energy. So it’s not too surprising to learn that her path to becoming a dancer took an unusual swerve when she was in her teens. Having trained in jazz, ballet, tap – “the whole shebang”, she says, from the age of 5, in her home-town of Perth, Langlois decided at 16 that she didn’t want to pursue dance any longer. “It all got a bit too much,” she recalls. “I wanted to finish school and do my TEE… and I wasn’t really keen on being a dancer at all. So I went to Curtin and enrolled in the Communications and Cultural Studies course, which is a Bachelor of Arts.” Whilst at Curtin, Langlois took acting units and also became involved in student theatre productions. “It got to the point where I was like, ‘I love performing and I want to do acting… but I feel like I need to go on a different journey to get there.’ I felt like dance was pulling me back,” she remembers.
Langlois’s break from dance had been total – “I had done nothing,” she says with a laugh. “So I started doing private lessons with Adrienne Eastoe and she encouraged me to go to Marie Walton Mahon Dance Academy in Newcastle and train full-time.” It sounds easy on paper, but, having had a complete rest from dance, plunging into full-time ballet training was a challenge, not just physically but culturally. “Going to Marie’s was a huge shock for me,” remembers Langlois. “It was like going backwards or something. I learned a lot of resistance and became really focused in those years. I gave up that lifestyle of going out, drinking and partying, hanging out with friends and going to the pub older – all that stuff that I was enjoying at uni. I realised that I had to really knuckle down because I was older than a lot of the students at Marie’s. They were all 14, 15, 16 at most… and I was 19. I needed to focus and catch up.”
And catch up Langlois did, auditioning successfully for the New Zealand School of Dance, for 2006. During her second year, however, her career path took another twist away from convention. “Garry Stewart, the director of Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), came over to look at a work of his that we were remounting called Currently Under Investigation,” says Langlois. “He came over for three days to watch our rehearsals… and he liked me. I think I was just really intense. Everything was just like go, go go! I think he could relate to that – I was the kind of dancer he was looking for. It was just good timing.”
Dancing with ADT was a huge learning curve, says Langlois. “It was really hard when I first joined because there were so many experienced dancers there who were all there because they had their own individual thing going. Garry really encourages that – he wants unique individuals... and you have to find your own way there. He doesn’t really tell you what he wants. It was kind of sink or swim. I learned a lot and I’m really grateful for having had that opportunity.”
Being plucked from second year uni to dance with ADT sounds like a fairy-tale for a dancer, but Langlois laughs when I make this observation. “It didn’t feel like it,” she remarks. “It felt like I had gone from somewhere where I knew my place and where I was going, to somewhere where I didn’t feel like I had a handle on anything, where I was constantly surprised. I had experiences in that company of performances where someone was sick, and so we would have to come in a couple of hours early and learn solos and learn duet material… it happened all the time on tours because they were three months long. It taught me how to think on my feet when I’m on stage.”
After three years at ADT, Langlois decided she was ready for a change and auditioned for Sydney Dance Company, where she subsequently spent 2011. “That was like going from one end of the spectrum to the other – two totally different aesthetics and skill bases,” she observes. Since then she has worked with independent choreographers, Larissa McGowan and Stephanie Lake, as well as Chunky Move.
Listening to Langlois talk about the path that has brought her to this point, one thing that strikes me is her incredible discipline. Yet her character in Keep Everything is kind of… nuts. “Antony chose really eccentric people for this work,” agrees Langlois. “A lot of stuff [I do in Keep Everything] is me. I do a lot of crazy stuff all the time, with my friends and family, and in the studio. I’m always searching for laughs and being a bit of a clown so it was really enjoyable, making this work.”
There’s no doubting that Langlois is a free-thinker, a rebel even. “I’ve got this thing inside me that comes out when I dance – it’s like a beast,” she muses. What fascinates me, then, how this self-described wacky individual coped with returning to the regimented schedule of full-time classical training. “I don’t know… I just wanted to dance so badly,” she reflects. “I think motivation is the key – when you’re motivated you can do anything.”