After 25 years, Australian dance star Lucy Guerin bows out of the company she founded

The choreographer said goodbye to Lucy Guerin Inc by dancing in public for the first time in 13 years - which she found ‘incredibly confronting’

If there is one thing the professional dancer learns never to expect, it’s longevity. The physical demands on the body and increasing risk of injury tend to necessitate short careers. Melbourne-based choreographer Lucy Guerin has certainly bucked that trend, with a CV spanning decades and several international awards under her belt. But after 25 years at the helm of her eponymous company, she is now stepping away, conferring her artistic directorship on choreographer Melanie Lane.

Before she left, Guerin returned to the stage for an exquisite solo show, Place Dances, inside Melbourne’s Buxton Contemporary art gallery. It was the first time she had danced publicly in 13 years. “I have found it incredibly confronting, to be honest,” she says, hours before the premiere. “As a dancer, you always remember in your body what it feels like to do an arabesque or a jump. And part of me thought I could still do all those things if I just got back in the studio and trained a bit.” She laughs at her own hubris. “But I’m afraid that wasn’t the case.”

Lucy Guerin Inc has been at the forefront of contemporary Australian dance almost from its inception, greatly influencing other local choreographers such as Chunky Move’s former artistic director Gideon Obarzanek and the internationally acclaimed Stephanie Lake. The company’s reputation for deep analysis and intellectual rigour can make their work seem academic to the uninitiated but, within the strict boundaries of its minimalist aesthetic, wonders bubble and burst forth.

“Pure dance is something I aspire to, but there’s always this level of theatricality that creeps in,” Guerin says. She has long been interested in “the structure of choreography and the way it interacts with space, rather than characters or narrative”; in Place Dances, she opens with a lecture in which she admits to being bored as a child whenever ballet turned to the story, being fascinated instead by the abstract lines of the corps.

Lines, and the mathematical geometries of space, have been central to Guerin’s choreography from the beginning. Her works often take place on austere, minimalist stages. In Place Dances at the Buxton Contemporary, she uses her body to set off the motion sensors on the doors and lifts in the gallery, as if opening on to other, purer worlds. She also uses brightly coloured electrical tape to emphasise diagonals, one of her favourite ways to differentiate space.

“It’s partly about my memories of first starting to dance,” she says. Her teacher numbered the four walls and the four corners of the room from one to eight, as a tangible way of locating the dancer in space. “It made me think about how I was put in relation to the architecture, or the confines of the room. And how that persists.”

While Guerin orchestrated the building of WXYZ, the company’s dance studio in North Melbourne, she has long been attracted to unusual spaces and non-theatrical settings. “There’s something about a visual arts context that doesn’t require a theatrical arc,” she says of her choice to stage her final Lucy Guerin Inc work at Buxton. “I feel like the audience opens up a little bit more to something less traditional, a different perspective.”

While there is inevitable sadness at her departure, there is also overwhelming gratitude: for the things she has managed to achieve, and all the dancers she met and influenced along the way. Highlights include the company’s selection for the 2023 Venice Biennale – where they performed two works, Pendulum and Split – and a New York Dance and Performance award, known colloquially as the Bessie.

“Split was a very special work for me,” Guerin says. The original production featured Lane, along with Lilian Steiner, and was “one of the only times working with the company where I could go in without an idea. We just worked on things till something emerged.” The result was ecstatic, what one reviewer called “a rare masterpiece of human struggle.”

Some of Lucy Guerin Inc’s work can be solemn and reverential – Pendulum, with its swinging golden orbs and ceremonial music, was particularly ruminative – but there’s often a sardonic, even slightly subversive humour at play. Place Dances is laugh-out-loud funny as Guerin subverts the pretensions of academia or throws her body face down on to a mass of black tulle in a winking demonstration of artistic hardship.

As she readies herself for departure, Guerin seems sanguine rather than triumphant. “I’m really proud of the works the company has made, and that we’ve been able to present them internationally. We’ve been to so many of the big theatres and that’s all exciting and shiny and lovely.” But she is most proud of the connections and opportunities she’s been able to forge with local artists: “The independent dance sector is where I made my career.”

The timing seems right. Guerin is about to embark on a month-long residency with the Bogliasco Foundation near Genoa, Italy, and has several projects coming up she is not yet able to announce. “I don’t know how I’m going to feel until it’s actually over, because it’s been so flat out,” she says. “It just felt like the right time and, once I’d vocalised it, I felt very resolved.”

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