Review: Lucy Guerin’s Place Dances
Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne
Friday 16 October 2026
Review by Belle Beasley
As the audience filed excitedly into Buxton Contemporary’s large exhibition space, Lucy Guerin was sitting in the centre of the room, framed by two large structural columns. Wearing a black dress and chunky black heels, she was stretching her fingers, twiddling her thumbs, and muttering lines under her breath. This prologue functioned as a performed warm-up, a glimpse into the ‘behind-the-scenes’. Dancer and choreographer Alisdair Macindoe, the sound designer for Place Dances and cameoing as gallery invigilator/backstage hand, enters Guerin’s ‘warm-up zone’ to call her onto ‘stage’, and Guerin exits the space. This was the first few minutes of Lucy Guerin’s Place Dances, the milestone performance marking the choreographer’s retirement as Artistic Director of Melbourne-based company Lucy Guerin Inc.
A recording of Guerin’s voice echoed through the gallery, signalling the ‘start’ of the performance and foregrounding Place Dances as a ‘dance essay’. Rather than purely relying on movement, the dance essay integrates language to communicate choreographic ideas, in this case recounting concerns and influences that have shaped Guerin’s career. The text commenced at the inception of Guerin’s dance journey which was, as is for so many dancers, in the ballet studio. Guerin traced her early memories as a young girl in Adelaide, where she encountered her first understandings of the body in space through classical systems of spatial orientation. She recounted her pivotal move to New York in the late ’80s, and subsequent encounter with the milieu of ‘Downtown Dance’, a scene indebted to the post-modern innovations of the Judson Dance Theatre. Guerin recalled how the works of her contemporaries stripped back extraneous ornamentation in favour of a “new kind of virtuosity” based in “interrupting known coordinations”. Reflecting on her own work from that era, Guerin recalled a critic’s description of her style as an “acceptance of disparity”.
The lights lowered and Guerin re-entered the space, placed her back against the wall and lowered her head. Her hands outstretched, we watched as Guerin’s fingers extended, flexed, contracted, and shook. ‘I’m trying to say something’, the recorded voice graveled, turning crackly and muffled over the speakers. The performance space, which had until this point registered as a white cube, suddenly felt more like a theatre. Beginning to dance, Guerin executed movements that were minimal, repetitive and playful, oscillating between angular forms and loose, flip-flap tosses. Crossing the floor, she swung her legs, shimmied her hips, and shook her head, as if deliberately purging her physicality of nervous energy. She exited the space and re-entered, hugging a gallery column and filling her hands with invisible air, giving new weight and volume to the negative space around her.
Next, Guerin used tape to outline a white cube on the floor in the centre of the space; a direct nod to her ongoing interest in the contrasting contexts of the theatre versus the gallery (the black box versus the white cube), as well as the minimalist principles underpinning her practice. By staging Place Dances within the gallery’s bright geometry, Guerin implicitly announced her preference of the white cube’s unique parameters for this particular performance, perhaps embracing its capacity for a radical renegotiation of form, or its liberation from the intimidating darkness of a traditional theatre. Standing at the perimeter of the cube, she peered across the tape before slowly traversing its edges. Then, she began running the perimeter of the box, lightly tapping each corner as she passed. The action felt like a chant or a ritual. A playground game for summoning ghosts.
The recorded audio recommenced and Guerin moved to the centre of the room. ‘There are at least three schools of classical thought which govern orientation in space’, the voice explained. ‘The Russian, or Vaganova, the British, or Royal Academy of Dance, and the Italian, Cecchetti.’ The voice framed these techniques as grounding principles which prevent the dancer from being lost, from flailing in space, instead offering endless possibilities for orienting oneself in space. Breaking from the geometry, Guerin leaves the room and returns with pink tape, slashing it across the gallery’s white walls with emphatic, Barbie-coloured diagonals. As the recording explained her lifelong enamor with the power and emphasis of the diagonal line, Guerin launched into a dynamic diagonal sequence inside the white cube; skipping, shuffling, executing temps levés, walking on demi-pointe, and leaping in attitude. The soundscape then shifted as a new, pitch-modified voice entered the space – low, menacing, filled with growls and hisses. ‘What are you doing?’ the voice taunted. ‘It’s hard,’ Guerin responded live. ‘You always say it’s hard. Then why do you keep doing it?’ the voice hissed. Guerin introduced a long black veil into space, wrapping herself in the fabric like a mummy or an earthworm in a cocoon: a macabre, funereal reference contributed by dramaturg and costume designer Kate Davis. Guerin stood tall and proud like a bronze Grecian statue, slowly rotating while the sweeping black fabric cleaned the floor, before crumpling into a ball on the ground.
Again Guerin’s voice rings out across the speakers, recounting early days in the studio developing her choreographic practice. She recalls the immense scale of her youthful visions and her desire to create work that could encapsulate all her disparate interests at that time: minimalism, virtuosity, transgression are a few on the long list. Facing this mammoth task, Guerin admits that much of her early studio time was spent lying paralysed on the floor, overwhelmed by insurmountable desires. Mirroring this memory, Guerin crawls along the floor and curls into a heap with back against the wall, the dark plumes of her veil strikingly intersecting the pink diagonals of tape on the wall. This image lingered as the speech returned, this time it is Lucy’s voice unrecorded. She recounts memories from her childhood in Adelaide – the bleached limestone, the sheep carcasses strung up beneath gum trees, pink party hats and purple pansies in the garden. ‘I always liked making things,’ she concludes.
Shedding the veil, she returns to the centre of the space and commences a light-hearted sequence of repetitive bouncing movements with frivolous gestures. Hips swivel, hands and feet flicker, and she feigns a sassy phone call posture before tossing her wrists as if throwing a bouquet. She shimmies her shoulders and bourrées while spinning, then gestures to riding a horse, feet prancing, while the music bounces and chugs. Finally she begins to couru on demi-pointe backwards, directing herself into the elevator which until now has remained unnoticed. Macindoe presses the call button and Guerin bourrées into the shaft, the elevator’s green lighting matching the building’s exit sign (either the work of lighting designer Paul Lim or a serendipitous synchronicity). As the elevator doors begin to slide shut, she steps determinately in between them, forcing them to reopen. ‘I’m here! I’m not gone! Detect me!’ the gesture seems to scream. Retreating one last time, the elevator doors close on Guerin, signalling the end of the performance, the end of her tenure as the director of Lucy Guerin Inc., and perhaps, symbolising her transit into a new journey, a departure into the unknown.
Place Dances is more than a retirement retrospective; it is an abstract interrogation of a life dedicated to movement. By staging her farewell within the stark geometry of the gallery rather than the dark illusion of the theatre, Guerin strips away the ornamentation of her career to lay bare its guiding tensions and contradictions: classical order versus postmodern disruption, minimalist restraint versus intimate expression, abstract form versus narrative representation. As the elevator doors close on her final, defiant demand to be detected, Guerin leaves behind a monumental legacy with Lucy Guerin Inc., transforming her departure not into an ending, but into an uncharted next step.
Place Dances ran at Buxton Contemporary from 15–18 October. Explore upcoming Lucy Guerin Inc. performances here.