Photo by Jeff Busby
Lucy Guerin spent much of
the 1990s performing and choreographing in New York, before returning to her
native Australia. Now we only get to see her work sporadically, and it has been
six years she her company last appeared here. The impression left by that 2003
program, at Dance Theater Workshop, was of a choreographer in rigorous control
of her material, creating beautifully focused, powerfully evocative works.
Now Guerin is back in New
York, and thanks to a friendly partnership between Baryshnikov Arts Center and
Dance Theater Workshop, audiences here have been able to catch up on her two
most recent works. Last week at BAC, her six exemplary dancers performed Corridor, an hour filled with
devastating surprises, that evoked erratic, disturbed behavior brought on by
being constantly connected and wired-up via technology.
This coming week, at DTW,
they will perform her 2006 work Structure
and Sadness. It takes its inspiration from an event that became a national
tragedy in Australia: the 1970 collapse of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne,
then under construction. “Initially, I was looking at
the general idea of collapse and disintegration. I researched quite a lot of
bridge collapses; It was going to be a more general abstract work,” Guerin
recalls, speaking from her New York hotel shortly after her arrival. “Then, as
I did more research, I thought it would be a challenge for me to base it on one
particular incident.
“That’s
something quite different for me. Generally, my work doesn’t connect to a real
event, or any narrative storyline. So that was something I wanted to try and to
see if I could [do] because it’s quite a difficult thing to represent in dance.
I like to choose subjects which don’t render themselves easily in dance,
because I think it pushes me in new directions.”
She based the
movement vocabulary for Structure and
Sadness on engineering principles of compression, suspension, torsion and
failure. She recalled the experience of “working with these physical
principles, but when you apply them to the human body, or two human bodies
together, this emotional language comes up that parallels the experiences that
were a result of that collapse. It’s quite a universal thing, that trust that
we have in our built environment, and what happens when that fails—the effects
on a human body and emotional impact. It became quite interesting to balance
that functionality with the more internal, emotional aspects of the work.”
The work is a richly
layered collaboration, with significant contributions from the set and lighting
designers Ben Cobham and Andrew Livingston, and the motion graphics designed by
Michaela French. The dancers build and construct as part of the choreography, creating
an intricate structure at each performance.
“The dancers
spent an intense amt of time working out how to build this structure. I was
really impressed by their focus and concentration,” Guerin said. “That was
really an essential part of making the work. I wouldn’t have been able to do it
without those particular dancers.” In terms of performance, she notes that Structure and Sadness is “hugely demanding
for them. They’ve got this incredible focus and concentration on the building
and then they have to drop that, switch completely when they’re dancing.”
Guerin worked
in close collaboration with composer Gerald Mair, whose score incorporates
real-life sounds—including some recorded underneath the existing West Gate
Bridge. Midway through, the pop song “Crimson and Clover” puts in an
appearance. That came from Guerin’s having researched Australia’s top 20 songs
in 1970. Ironically, number one was “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” “Of course I
couldn’t use that; that was way too much. Actually it was great to use ‘Crimson
and Clover’ because it has this really happy, sweet, joyful sense to it. That’s
one moment in the piece where you get let off from the tension.”
Taking an
analytical and imaginative approach to a real-life, devastating event, Guerin
has created a quietly devastating and potent work. New York’s loss has been
Melbourne’s gain, but fortunately local dance audiences are again able to experience
this singular artists’ work.
Structure and Sadness
Oct. 1-3, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19 St. (betw. 7th
& 8th Aves.), 212-924-0077;
7:30, $15.
