Lucy Guerin was born in Adelaide and trained at Adelaide's Centre for Performing Arts in 1982 before joining the companies of Russell Dumas (Dance Exchange) and Nanette Hassall (Danceworks). She moved to New York in 1989 for seven years, where she danced with Tere O'Connor Dance, the Bebe Miller Company and Sara Rudner.Now. She founded her own company in 2001 and has gathered an admirable collection of awards and raves, making her troupe well-known in the US, Great Britain and Europe.
Her dances are known for fervent, daring movements and their unusual isolation and articulation of the joints. Two of her dances, "Two Lies" and "Soft Centre," have been performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Project. Australian journalists report that her complexity and highly conceptual works have been highly influential on young dancers and students in Australia today.
She often delights in choreography that focuses on the small gesture, she can seemingly create an entire dance out of the juxtaposition of elbows or quivering fingers. The troupe is closely aligned with another Melbourne company, Chunky Move, which is led by her long-term partner, Gideon Obarzanek. The pair of companies share a "Melbourne aesthetic," according to local critics, that is based largely in their small movements and isolations.
REPERTORY TOURING NORTH AMERICA
UNTRAINED
Premiere 11th March 2009
at Arts House, Meat Market
Dance Massive, Australia
So you think you can dance?
Untrained is a quirky and irreverent theatrical exploration that takes its performers and its audience into a whole new undefined experience.
Four men take to the stage. Two of these men are highly skilled, experienced dancers and two are acclaimed visual artists with no movement training whatsoever. The complex, refined movements that one man can do with ease, another can only approximate.
All are given the same instructions. It’s how they execute them that displays an individual portrait of each man’s character, as well as an unavoidable comparison between the participants. It’s the evolution of information, built up through units of action, that shows what they have in common and where their physical histories set them apart.
"you have to work hard to resist the unexpected charm of this show"
Alison Croggon – Theatre Notes March 2009
“I left wanting to sit down and see it all again. It’s wonderful inimitable stuff… a fascinating combination of dance, theatre, improvisation and multimedia all presented with just the right amount of quirk and irreverence”
Simonne Michelle Wells Australian Stage March 2009
Concept/ Direction: Lucy Guerin,
Performers in Premiere Production: Ross Coulter, Antony Hamilton,
Simon Obarzanek, Byron Perry
Music: Duplo Remote
Producer: Michaela Coventry
Duration 60 minutes
Untrained and Lucy Guerin Inc are supported by Arts Victoria, the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australia International Cultural Council, an initiative of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Arts House, City of Melbourne, and the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust. Untrained was developed in the CultureLAB.
HUMAN INTEREST STORY
Using image, sound, language and movement, Human Interest Story explores the affects of the news cycle on our psyche and questions our ability to accept the reality of distant tragedy into the daily routine of our lives. Shifting between humour and anxiety it shows our varying responses to the stream of information that reaches into our domestic environments about newsworthy events in other places.
Is the news a consumer product which neutralises our ability to have a genuine reaction to the world’s suffering? Or does it permeate our lives in a deeply affecting way? Human Interest Story attempts to comprehend our responses to current events which range from switching off to heartbreak and how this unending flow of words and images shapes us.
Presented initially as rote text where natural disasters, wars, riots and environmental collapse are interchangeable with celebrity updates, the language of news presentation devolves into a driving utterance which propels movement into a visceral reimagining of the impact of reports from around the globe.
Human Interest Story has an outstanding ensemble of dancers and collaborators including set design by Gideon Obarzanek, lighting by Paul Jackson, composition and sound design by Jethro Woodward and costumes by Paula Levis. It also includes a special newscast by Anton Enus (World News Australia - SBS).
STRUCTURE AND SADNESS
Struture and Sadness is a complex dance work which bases its unique movement vocabulary on the engineering principles of compression, suspension, torsion and fall. Lucy Guerin uses the 1970 collapse of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, Australia where 35 men lost their lives, as a starting point to Structure and Sadness. The piece examines the bridge as a supporting and connecting structure. On stage, the performers construct a precarious world teetering on the point of collapse. The work shifts between practical building of supportive structures and the impressionistic portrayal of disintegration and sorrow. Structure and Sadness explores an event in recent history not as a factual narrative, but as a physical, emotional and visual response to a devastating accident.
