Body Pixel

Choreographer Lucy Guerin… oh, yeah… Her dance piece ‘Love me’, which is actually a triptych was really something special; it was on schedule almost at the end of Dance Week Festival, just right in time to lift me up…

Very powerful technology based performance, but at the same time grounded with strong choreography. Dancers Kyle Kremerskothen, Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry and Stephanie Lake simply fulfilled Guerin’s idea on modern society and relations we get into.

Lucy Guerin Inc (c)

The piece starts with ‘Reservoir of Giving Land I and II’, a part where simple use of video footage as scenography built up the whole idea of the narrative. A pair of lovers having some second thoughts about their love being slightly frightened by life routine. Guerin withdraw a line between privacy and social expectations as obstacles in our ‘love matters’ doubt with different sub-titles.

See excerpts from ‘Love me’ and talk with Lucy Guerin

The second part entitled ‘On’ reminded me on Pina Baush (when she said to her performers to dance with fingers only), but located in urban post cyber punk society.

The whole impression is marked up by really, really impressive dancer Kirstie McCracken and unbelievable choreography for two dancers with lines based on their flexible torsos and hips, loose wrists and geometrically precise legs work that expansively fade into each other.

Lucy Guerin Inc (c)

Kirstie  McCracken and Byron Pery had such concentration, while performing hand interactions before switching to the whole body, and I simply couldn’t notice the actual switch to the whole embodiment. McCracken is one of those rare dancers with a sense for subtle physical theatre. No doubt, she is capable to be a ‘performative animal’, but she knows that less is more. With such skill there is no obstacle for dancer; and choreographer, too.

An ultra-modern and ultra-emotional choreography ends with part ‘Melt’; structurally and conceptually covering an universal theme, as she describes ‘a rise in temperature from freezing to boiling with each degree explored temperamentally and physically. It is a highly focused duet for two women whose detailed movements are intensified by the mercurial medium of motion graphics’.

Stephanie Lake and McCracken had all the time completely articulated arms coordinated with fast and energetic movements, making a body parallel with physics formulas and digital realms based on numbers.

By placing them in the middle of a projected square block, this part of ‘Love me’ got the perfect interaction cohabiting meanings between dancers and digitally projected worlds.

From Melt by Lucy Guerin, photo by Jeff Busby (c)

Her performative corpus in ‘Love me’ is pulsating till the last seconds of the piece. It is an overview of personality related to mass culture productionism, but without preaching or judging.

Factz
Born in Adelaide, Australia, Lucy Guerin graduated from the 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 based in Melbourne, Guerin has been commissioned by Chunky Move, Ros Warby, Woo Co (Denmark), Ricochet (UK ), The Berlin Literature Festival (with poet Michael Lenz), JCDN/Hirano (Japan), Dance Works Rotterdam and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project (USA) among others.

In 2002 she formed her company Lucy Guerin Inc www.lucyguerin.com. Her works have toured to France, The Netherlands, UK, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, Korea, Shanghai, Canada and throughout the USA.

From Structure and Sadness by Lucy Guerin (c)

In 2000 Guerin was awarded the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for achievement by an individual. Other awards include the Prix d’auteur from the Rencontres Choregraphiques Internationales de Bagnolet in France, a 1994 New York Foundation for the Arts Choreographic Fellowship and a 1997 New York Dance and Performance Award (a ‘Bessie’) for her piece Two Lies.

In 2007,  Structure and Sadness won an Australian Green Room award for ‘Best Choreography’, a Helpmann Award for ‘Best Dance Work’ and an ‘Australian Dance Award’ for Best Performance by a Company’ Recent works for Lucy Guerin Inc include Structure and Sadness, Corridor and Untrained. She has also collaborated on projects with visual artist David Rosetzky, ACMI screen gallery, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Opera. (Lucy Guerin’s bio taken from the official site)