Dance Week Festival

Reservoir of Giving I and II

choreography: Lucy Guerin

visual artist: David Rosetzky

music: Paul Healy

lighting: Keith Tucker

stylist: Moira Rogers

cast: Kyle Kremerskothen, Kirstie McCracken

duration:12”

On

choreography: Lucy Guerin

motion graphics: Michaela French

music: Darrin Verhagen

lighting: Keith Tucker

cast: Kirstie McCracken, Byron Perry

duration:21”

Melt

choreography: Lucy Guerin

motion graphics: Michaela French

music: Franc Tetaz

cast: Stephanie Lake, Kirstie McCracken

duration:22”

about the project

Australian choreographer, Lucy Guerin, a Bessie Award recipient, successfully fuses sound, voice, text and video with dance. Her three-part work Love Me explores the diverse faces of love, through a carefully designed contemporary world defined by moving pictures which define the spaces.

Reservoir of Giving I and II addresses the space between people and how we attempt to reconcile that distance through language. Set within a stylised domestic environment, the dancers seem lifted straight from a designer lifestyle magazine but present a less than perfect view of contemporary life.

On is a duet which occurs in isolated windows of light and projection.The two dancers perform detailed miniatures of closeness and separation which reinforce the vast darkness which waits outside their tiny bright world.

Melt descibes 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.

about  the choreographer

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. Her works have toured to France, The Netherlands, UK, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, Korea, Shanghai, Canada and throughout the USA.

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.

about the company

Lucy Guerin Inc is an Australian dance company that was established in 2002 to produce new work by choreographer Lucy Guerin. Renowned for the skill and audacity of its small group of performers, the company is committed to challenging and extending the art of contemporary dance. Typically, a production might involve voice, video, sound, text and industrial design as well as Guerin’s lucid choreography.

A Lucy Guerin Inc production is always a stimulating and intimate experience. Not only focussed on formal concerns, the company is also dedicated to the exploration and redefinition of everyday events and emotions. Crucially this is always a choreographic exploration, offering revelations and nuances of feeling that could not be generated or communicated in any artform other than dance.

Lucy Guerin Inc has been a major influence on the growing identity of Australian dance at home and abroad. Much of this influence stems from the company’s programmatic research into choreographic practice. This research is supported through Pieces for Small Spaces, its annual curated program for new dance works by emerging choreographers in Melbourne. Also, the company sponsors studio showings of first-draft works through its First Run presentations. It also offers workshops with local and international artists, presents one-off special events and maintains an artist-in-residence program.

Lucy Guerin Inc has been supported by The Australia Council, Arts Victoria, City of Melbourne, the Besen Family Foundation, The Myer Foundation and the Harold Mitchell Foundation.