Lucy Guerin Inc.

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 FALL 2009

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.

CORRIDOR (premiering October 2008)
Corridor is based on human activity, both mental and physical, in places of waiting and transit. It explores the no man’s land  that we must pass through to engage in the activities of living and dying. Corridor will be presented in a unique spatial set up for the audience. Two long rows of chairs (about 65 feet each) will be placed facing each other about 16 feet apart and there will be a maximum of 80-100 seats (40 to 50 each side). The performance will occur between them giving the audience a unique perspective from which to view the dancers as well as each other. Through the integration of choreography, set design, lighting and sound, this work will use the spatial and emotional characteristics of the corridor to present human interior states and interactions which are known to us all, but which resonate with far greater complexity than their  exterior manifestations. Corridor will premiere in October 2008 at the Melbourne International Festival.