Lucy Guerin talks to Nina Levy about the value of working overseas, her new work for Melbourne Festival and what's next on her calendar.
Earlier this year Lucy Guerin was awarded the Australia Council Award for dance. Listening to her talk about what she has been up to recently, both with her company Lucy Guerin Inc, and as an individual, it’s clear she is recognised for her work as much overseas as in Australia. “In the last year or so I’ve been travelling quite a lot,” she reports. “I co-directed a production of Macbeth at the Young Vic in London and I made a piece for Rambert, also in London… and I remounted my work Weather on Skånes Dansteater, a company in Malmo, Sweden.”
Aside from the kudos of gaining international recognition, these overseas commissions have artistic benefits, says Guerin. “Doing commissions is a really different thing to making works on your own company. It’s fantastic in that you’re put into a different context. It causes you to think differently. You have to employ different methods, because you’re working with people you don’t necessarily know very well. You don’t have the time to explore their individual strengths as much you do working with dancers you know well. For example, working with the Rambert dancers, they were incredibly strong technical dancers. They train really hard, they do circuit training, a lot of Pilates, ballet class pretty much every day, but it was interesting – they were very open to trying new things. So I was able to connect with them and get an understanding of the way they work and think. Working on the play, on Macbeth, was a very different experience for me. I was working with a theatre director, Carrie Cracknell, and just to get an understanding of how different dance and theatre are in their process, in the way you develop a work. Working with a script was really valuable. So [these opportunities] open you up to different ways of seeing things.”
Taking her company, Lucy Guerin Inc, to perform overseas is also incredibly valuable. “It’s great for the work to have a longer life,” she explains. “It’s Important for the dancers to be able to do that work a number of times because it really changes, it keeps developing, finding itself, the more that they perform it. I think performing my work in Melbourne is really important but to show it to different kinds of audiences, and get different responses, it just broadens your thinking and makes you understand more clearly what you’ve made.”
It’s all about balance, though. At home in Melbourne, with her company, is where the magic happens, says Guerin. “In a way, the work I do here, with my own company, is where I discover things. It’s where I’m able to push my practice and experiment with things that may possibly fail. That’s a really important part of being an artist, to have that support and trust from the artists I work with regularly… that if something doesn’t work out, that’s ok, that it will next time.”
Right now, Guerin is focused on that part of her work... at home, in her studio. “This year is a big year of making and creating," she says. "I’ve got four works that I’m working on this year. One of those is The Dark Chorus, which will premiere at the Melbourne Festival.”
According to the publicity materials, The Dark Chorus’s title references both the voice of the masses and our own internal monologue. At the time of speaking to Guerin, she is still a few weeks off commencing the rehearsal period that will culminate in the aforementioned premiere. The first stage of development, which took place last year for The Dark Chorus, took place last year. Right now, she says, she trying to “distil” the ideas from that first development in preparation for the second development. I remark that the concept, as outlined in the media release, feels absolutely relevant in the light of recent world events, in particular the way in which Brexit has unleashed a cacophony of bitter feeling from sectors of the British populace. The starting point for the work, however, came from quite a different place, says Guerin. “Maybe it’s because I’m a Gemini, but I have this tendency to see both sides of something as a dialogue rather than arriving at a fixed opinion," she remarks. "My works are often more discussions than particular outcomes. A few years ago I made a piece for the Lyon Opera Ballet called Black Box. It had a large three metre square black wooden box that flew up and down on the stage and revealed and obscured the dancers inside. As it lifted up they would kind of spill out of it and then get sucked back in. I had this idea that, as it was at the Lyon Opera, that I would like to have these strange dark characters in opera costume kind of lurking around the perimeter. I tried it a few times but I thought, ‘oh no it doesn’t really work, it sort of clutters the idea.’ So I scratched it… but it really stuck with me and so I decided to work with the idea by itself, rather than as an adjunct to something else. So that’s where the idea came from. I guess it’s kind of a structural idea in some ways… I think what interests me about it is the setting up of this almost cellular organism or it sort of reminds me of a brain or a machine, or some kind of closed system. I guess in a way, working with it in studio, it’s really interesting to see what that idea produces, to have this very bright, clear centre that’s surrounded by darkness… darkness and history. As you say, it is the idea of these extremes, of people gravitating towards extremes in their thinking, which does seem to feed into it.”
Guerin’s other projects will follow The Dark Chorus premiere. “After Melbourne Festival I’m working on a piece with Gideon Obarzanek. It’s a collaboration between Dancenorth and Lucy Guerin Inc. It’s a project with an Indonesian music duo called Senyawa who are kind of heavy metal with a bit of a traditional influence. We’ve already had one development on that which has been really fantastic. At the moment I’m also working on a duet for two dancers, Lillian Steiner and Melanie Lane, and that’s going to hopefully premiere early next year. So it’s a really busy time because the company will be touring my work Motion Picture to France and Belgium in January/February then we’ve got the presentation of this new work with Gideon in the Asia TOPA Festival – it’s a new festival of Asian arts at the Arts Centre and in the arts precinct in Melbourne.”
The Dark Chorus plays the Meat Market October 6-12 as part of Melbourne Festival. Read more about Melbourne Festival here.
In the October/November issue of Dance Australia Nina Levy interviews Alexandre Hamel of Le Patin Libre, whose contemporary ice-skating work, Vertical Influences will play Melbourne Festival this October... OUT SOON!