Friday, March 29

‘It’s like being possessed’: Australia’s star choreographer Lucy Guerin on 20 years of dance | dancing


TOAustralian choreographer Lucy Guerin has just landed in Melbourne from Aix-en-Provence, where she has been working on a show involving young dancers, all aged between 11 and 18. “It opens in November,” she says. “I’m going back there once more because we have to rehearse during the school holidays.” In the meantime, she’s in Australia to premiere a new show, FluxJobat North Melbourne’s Arts House.

That eclecticism, not to mention her global reach, is typical of an artist who has always had one foot in the international scene – both for artistic reasons and practical necessity. “There aren’t a lot of touring options in Australia. If you spend a lot of time and money doing a job, you want people to see it,” she says.

‘I just feel it’s impossible to label yourself’ … Lucy Guerin. Photographer: Gregory Lorenzutti

It will be 20 years in September since Guerin launched the company that bears her name, Lucy Guerin Inc. While she is not prone to retrospection, she has started looking back at past work in preparation for another show she’s planning. “I don’t tend to get out the old videos, but I’ve been returning to some of the movement concerns I had when I was younger,” she says.

It is an extraordinary body of work, including shows such as Structure and Sadness, which used symbol and abstraction to explore the 1970 collapse of the West Gate Bridge; or Human Interest Story, which blended spoken word and dance to investigate the impact of news cycles on our psyches. Or the gloriously monochrome Motion Picture, which saw the 1950 noir film DOA projected on to the dancers.

Born in Adelaide, Guerin “really began my choreographic life in New York”, a city she lived in for seven years. She initially trained as a ballet dancer, which surprises those familiar with her work from Ella, eschewing as it does the emotional pull of ballet for something more sparse and cerebral. “I never became a ballet dancer, but the idea of ​​repetition, those sequence of movements that you do in class every day, finding out more and more about the same movement, gave me a sense of inquiry, of going deeper into things,” she explains.

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Ballet isn’t the only influence that has stayed with Guerin since those early days; she became interested in “release techniques”, which she describes as “much more about the way the body is structured anatomically”. With its emphasis on the natural inclinations of human movement, on the principals of fluidity and ease, release techniques have widely influenced contemporary dance. “There’s a funny thing that happens when you’ve been a dancer for a long time and you move into choreography,” Guerin says. “You try to create movement and you really feel inhabited – it’s like being possessed – by a lot of different ghosts. It feels like all the movement styles you’ve ever learned just start coming out.”

But over time, the anxiety of influence wanes. “Now, it’s the opposite. I’m almost more influenced by younger generations of choreographers, or just curious about what is coming up,” she says. It is this curiosity, this need to “let the flow of ideas wash over you, just to stay connected with what’s going on”, that has ensured Guerin’s reputation as an innovator remains as strong now as when she first burst on to the scene. “Dance is a social and collaborative form, so I’m always being inspired and in communication with the dancers – and with my collaborators, composers, designers, costume designers – when I’m making new work.”

Guerin's show Split, which involved two dancers bifurcating the stage with duct tape until they can only stand.
Lucy Guerin’s show Split, which involves two dancers bifurcating the stage with duct tape until they can only stand. Photographer: Gregory Lorenzutti

Her new show, Flux Job, wasn’t intended to reflect the lives of dancers over the past two years of isolation, but it bled into the work, perhaps inevitably. “It always began with four individual dancers inhabiting their own worlds. And because it’s been postponed and rescheduled over almost two years it just became about separation,” she says.

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Two central ideas solidified for Guerin as she was developing Flux Job: space and time. “Space has become such a topic of concern, and proximity is now charged with danger,” she says. “Everyone is very conscious of space, which is one of the fundamental and essential elements of choreography. I almost couldn’t help but incorporate that into the work.” And similarly, the malleability of time during lockdowns; for Guerin, “There’d be days when it would seem to just disappear and get stalled up, and then others when it just expanded.”

Guerin has been lumbered with the postmodern tag almost from the beginning of her career. While she does n’t care to categorize her work de ella – “I just feel it’s impossible to label yourself; that’s the job of others, really ”– she can see why her style encourages the term. Postmodernism has a particular meaning in dance that is distinct from other fields, like art or literature; it describes work that is often nonlinear and anti-narrative, rejecting dramatic arcs and emotive gestures. Any suggestion of climax or catharsis is almost viewed as suspicious, as being too easy or cheap a way to communicate meaning with audiences.

“I don’t enjoy going to shows where I can feel myself being pushed and manipulated into certain emotional states,” Guerin says. “I love seeing things that are more abstract, which leave a lot of space for me to have my own thoughts, where I can almost participate in the work, rather than having it imposed upon me.”

The 2015 production of Macbeth at London's Young Vic, directed by Carrie Cracknell and Guerin.
The 2015 production of Macbeth at London’s Young Vic, directed by Carrie Cracknell and Lucy Guerin. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

This could almost read as Guerin’s manifesto. Her ascetic and highly disciplined approach to the art form is why her audience reactions to her work can vary so dramatically, why there seems such a vast array of interpretive possibilities available to us. Even Guerin finds herself shocked sometimes: “I can never tell what the audience reaction will be.”

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She remembers the reaction to her 2009 show Untrained as particularly disconcerting. The show saw two professional and two amateur dancers responding to specific instructions; the gap between the two pairs became a kind of competition between awkward naturalism and polished competence. “People found it really funny – I was sitting in the audience mortified. I thought ‘Oh my god, this is terrible, they’re laughing at the work!’” Guerin says. “But in the end that laughter was really supportive and I got used to it.”

With such a rich back catalog of works, are there any that Guerin feels are central to her legacy? “Sometimes you’re working with an idea and it might take a few works to really nail it, but there’s lots of them I quite like,” she says. She mentions Split, an ingenious work that involved two dancers bifurcating the stage with duct tape, then abandoning one half of the playing space, until they’re left with a square too small to do anything in but stand. And Conversation Piece, which recorded live improvised speech and looped it in increasingly bizarre and complex ways, exploring the nexus between the spoken and the gestural.

“I’ve always had this interest, or confoundedness, about the relationship between language and movement,” she says. “I’ve tried in many works to figure it out, not always successfully. In Conversation Piece, I found a meaningful connection between those two things.”

She has returned to that interest in Flux Job, which blends text and movement, this time in collaboration with the brilliant theater director Adena Jacobs. And having dancers speak on stage – not their usual job – links back to Untrained and the line between professionalism and competence.

It seems that, no matter how far Guerin goes as a choreographer, her interests and ideas loop back on themselves, scratching at a sequence of movements to find the layers underneath. That discipline, the sense of inquiry she learned in ballet class all those years ago, has deepened with time. “I suppose that’s what I’m looking for,” she says. “Something that’s distilled and wall back – yet really compelling.”


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