Is there a more consistently engaging choreographer in Australia than Lucy Guerin? Since it was founded in 2002, her company, Lucy Guerin Inc, has produced some of the most varied, compelling and original works of contemporary dance in the country.
Consider, for instance, 2012’s Conversation Piece – an unremarkable name for a truly remarkable work. Developed in conjunction with Belvoir, six performers, three actors and three dancers stand on stage and have an eight-minute conversation, which they record on their iPhones. That conversation, completely improvised and therefore different in every performance, becomes the script for the work that follows, looping back over itself as the performers slot the words into pre-existing performance structures, simultaneously changing the intended meaning of both in ways that are surprising, hilarious and profound.
Before that, there was 2009’s Untrained – performed as recently as 2015 – in which two professional dancers are paired with two complete novices, a production Guardian reviewer Judith Mackrel called “funny, charming and often revealing”. Given the same instructions, the performers’ capacity to execute the required movements varied immensely, with the untrained performers’ gallant attempts a source of both humour and honesty.
Guerin says that the company’s most recent work, Split, is a return to the “luxury of closeness” that comes from working with only two dancers. It is certainly a much more sparse and simply structured work than some of her other pieces.
As the house lights go down, the pulsing, rhythmic soundscape (from British electronic musician Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner) that has been background to the chatter of patrons slowly comes to the fore of audience consciousness. The stage lights come up and two dancers appear, Melanie Lane and Lilian Steiner, the former clothed, the latter completely nude, standing in a plain black performance space featuring only a large square marked out on floor with white tape.
For the first half of the piece they dance in perfect unison, traversing a range of emotional terrain and the entirety of the physical space. At times they are balletic, poised; at others they seem to shift anxiously. What starts out as clear gestures – beckoning, seduction, exasperation – disintegrate on repetition until the dancers almost seem to be mocking any meaning these movements might initially hold for the audience.
The white square in which they’re performing initially seems innocuous – a simple demarcation of performance space – until precisely halfway through the performance, the dancers stop, pick up a roll of tape sitting at the back of the room, and split the space down the middle. Confined to one side of the stage, their world now halved, conflict ensues.
Dance, by its nature an abstract art form, is forever testing its relationship with the literal. Sometimes, this comes across as camp – such as the pantomime-like interludes that occur during a narrative ballet – other times, it can feel like a failure of aesthetics, like the audience has been lulled into this abstract world and then shoved back into rude reality. Yet that shift into the literal, when it happens in Guerin’s work, rarely jars.
That shift happens about halfway through Split, when the performance space has been divided for the first time. The dancers turn on each other, pulling hair, biting, miming cannibalism. If the mimicry here doesn’t feel silly, it’s entirely due to the poise and gravitas of the performers, and the audience’s acceptance of that, developed through the symmetry of the first act. Soon, the space is divided again, and again, as is the amount of time in which the performers spend in each division. Conflict escalates, until there is literally only enough space for them to stand, for perhaps a second.
Guerin’s work is never simply an expression of a static idea. The work is always progressing; it always contains a narrative arc of some kind. So too here: much of the success of Split is due to the simplicity of its structure, but despite that simplicity, it never feels still.
Guerin notes that there have been a range of interpretations of this work, all welcome to her. To me, the most immediately apparent interpretation was a political one. The female nude is consistently inscribed with meaning, many of which make an appearance here. Throughout the first act Steiner’s performance is perfectly serene; through the second, it is expressive and malleable. The coupling of a clothed performer with a nude one suggests the tension between nature and culture, sexuality, and the distinction between the public person and the private, and more besides. Two bodies, similar in form, split with the increasing tension of restricted space, spoke most clearly to me about the dangers of turning on one another and ourselves as our freedoms are curtailed.
The company celebrated its 15th anniversary last year, with Steiner winning a 2017 Helpmann award for her performance and the work itself being nominated for numerous accolades. It’s not the biggest or most colourful of Guerin’s productions, but it’s well worth your time.
• Split by Lucy Guerin Inc is showing at UnWrapped ƒestival at Sydney Opera House until 13 August
