Why is it – still – in dance you hardly ever see a woman lift a man?

In much of the dance world it seems like roles – and expectations on who will play them – are set in stone. “It’s really quite surprising how in the traditional or bigger companies you hardly ever see a woman lift a man, it’s still quite gender-specific,” says choreographer Lucy Guerin.

Choreographer Lucy Guerin.Credit:Eddie Jim

“It’s got to change soon, that idea of fluid gender is so huge now in our culture, it’s taking a while [for the big companies] to catch up.”

Guerin is reflecting on dance culture as she celebrates 21 years in the business. Her latest work, NEWRETRO, was devised to mark the milestone: it incorporates favourite pieces from each of those 21 years and features some of our top dancers, including Anthony Hamilton, Lee Serle and Lilian Steiner, as well as recent graduates.

Staged at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), it takes dance out of the formal theatre space and places it in a much more fluid setting, within a grand architectural context. “It’s quite stunning to see 21 dancers traversing this vast space, and the changes in the dynamics and the rhythm and the groupings,” Guerin says.

Visitors can come and go during the three-hour ticketed event, wandering through different rooms. In the large gallery space, most of the dancers are performing the entire time but within it there are solos and duos and quintets and sometimes the whole space empties out, Guerin says. “Sometimes there’s this incredible cacophony of movement.”

In NEWRETRO, sometimes there’s an ‘incredible cacophony of movement’.Credit:Gregory Lorenzutti

In the three smaller spaces, different iterations of the work are in play: in one, 21 video screens feature the 21 works Guerin’s drawing material from, playing on loop. In the next, there are dancers learning the movements for a piece from video. In another gallery, Guerin stages five female duets – a recurrent formation in her work.

While it’s rare to go through your back catalogue as Guerin has done for this show – she doubts she would have otherwise – it has been a powerful and emotional experience, to see the dancers from the earlier works and to observe both her influence on them, but also their influence on her. “Even though we know dance is an ephemeral form, it just feels like something.”

Did it make her think about how dance has changed and how her practice has changed? Absolutely. “Initially, my works were really movement focused and really about articulating the body, and trying to create an original movement vocabulary, focused on choreography, then more interested in text and more conceptual ideas in my work, then improvisation, so more spontaneous movement input from the dancers. Also noticing trends in movement – in the 90s, a lot of straight arms and legs, quite angular, manipulating your body, using this disjointed articulation.”

When the younger dancers were learning her early works, she saw clearly that their training has been quite different to hers. “My movement vocabulary is different, I don’t create movement like that anymore, I have dropped a lot of the balletic lines. That’s partly [about] getting older but … I’m becoming much more interested in a slightly more unformed, chaotic movement; it’s interesting to see those shifts as well.”

This immersive new work draws on 21 years of dance history.Credit:Gregory Lorenzutti

“As a choreographer with a long body of work behind me, it’s very rare that you feel that a show is perfect. There might be one or two that I think, I’ve really nailed it. Often the thing that I’m interested in is different to what the audience is interested in,” she says.

Guerin worked round the clock to get NEWRETRO ready. In 2022, she premiered five new works and produced seven, largely because of the backlog due to Covid. Last year, Lucy Guerin Inc was the recipient of a $2 million bequest from the organisations’ former chair and longtime board member Chloe Munro. “This work was one I was talking to Chloe about before she died, it feels very connected to her.”

Gender in dance has long interested Guerin: women by far outnumbered men when she was a student but for a long time there were few women running their own dance companies. That has changed for the better, she says, but there is still a way to go.

NEWRETRO is a stunning tribute to – and by – one of Australia’s best female choreographers. “I never wanted it to be a retrospective in the sense of looking back, I wanted to create something new out of the past material and to pass that on to the younger dancers as well.”

NEWRETRO by Lucy Guerin is at ACCA until April 2 as part of FRAME: A biennial of dance.

A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.

Most Viewed in Culture

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article