One of the most influential choreographers in Australia, Lucy Guerin has helped shape the
the physical language of this country (and beyond) for four decades now, two of them under the direction of her own company, Lucy Guerin Inc.
With a mandate to challenge our understanding of contemporary dance, a big part of the company’s approach has been Guerin’s commitment to fostering talent. Annual showcase Pieces is the perfect platform to do so.
And what better stage than the vast hall of Newport’s creative hub, the Substation? A
neoclassical brick cathedral with nods to old places of worship, it once helped power the nearby train lines then lay dormant for thirty-odd years before being reborn as a temple to the arts.
You can’t help but be awestruck by its towering bones, demanding a lot of a solo performer to somehow fill this place with their presence. Australian-Javanese dancer Melanie Lane makes it look easy. 'Into the Woods', the first of three 20-minute works, is not an adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical.
But there is something of his rewriting dark Brothers Grimm fairy tales in this feminist reclamation of bold women lost to savage witch hunts led by oppressive patriarchal forces. Perched in oversized pants the iridescent green shade of fish scales and a dark top, her long hair braided in a solitary tail, Lane recites fragments of historical records relaying the unfortunate ends of women accused of sorcery during the Middle Ages.
Her haunting oration plays out against a large screen playing a striking video work by Shanghai-based artist Tianyi Liao that depicts a creepy old house spinning as if caught in the tornado from the black and white opening sequence of the beloved movie The Wizard of Oz.
We’re drawn into the flickering half-light of its dingy interior as Lane simultaneously takes to the floor in a whirling dervish that makes full use of her whiplash locks. Sara Black joins her as a flesh-suited and horned devil in a magnetic pas de deux caught in a baleful red glare. Behind them, the house is torn asunder in a maelstrom that would appear to symbolise the funeral pyre on which so many women burned. It’s arresting stuff.
Rachael Wisby’s playful middle section of this intriguing triptych casts her French clown-like
figure in a diaphanous top and stripy pants. Her absurdly comic dance appears to challenge
gravity, with Wisby constantly arrested in the process of falling down, including impressive
plank work. Raising her shoes aloft on a wire into the lighting rig far above then drawing back the hall’s curtain to allow light to flood into the chamber, she commands our attention as she stumbles elegantly.
When a microphone slides down from the ceiling, she relays a ‘utopian’ tale that’s suspiciously dystopian-sounding. Spinning hypnotically, arms jerking, she conjures forth an imagined conversation between historical creative forces who have apparently been resurrected.
Weimar German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht is one of this number, whose return may bring about the world’s end. As unnerving as it is amusing, Wisby’s work draws on influences including American intellectual Rebecca Solnit, classical ballet Giselle, and Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s haunting movie, The Red Shoes. The combined effect is mesmerising.
The curtains are drawn once more and the Substation hall falls into darkness pierced only by
the spectral light emitted from a boxy analogue TV playing a video of spiralling blue skies.
Messing with our perception, this seemingly innocuous visual illuminates a sickly yellow,
undulating, maggot-like creature whose strange and beady-eyed face cannot, at first, be seen. Dancer Amber McCartney summons forth this beast that’s at turns nightmarish and comedic in the closing movement, 'Tiny Infinite Deaths'. Set to a pulsing experimental dance score by Makeda Zucco that’s half Super Mario Bros, half Berghain at 4am on a Berlin bender, that vibe just about covers McCartney’s erratic, animalistic groundwork.
It’s Cronenberg-like horror evoking the insectoid. All the while, that blue sky video devolves into the gurning of a razor-sharp-toothed woman whose gums bleed black.
Exhilaratingly odd in the very best way, all three works push, prod and provoke, which is the
core mission of Guerin’s Pieces. Lane, Wisby and McCartney are a powerful triumvirate to keep your eyes on.