Heavy
Lucy
Guerin Company
PICA
at the Echo Theatre 1515 SE 37th Ave., 242-1419
8 pm Friday-Sunday, May 28-30
$15, $12 PICA members
Lucy Guerin will conduct a two-hour master dance class at
5:30 pm Thursday, May 27, at Conduit, 918 SW Yamhill St.,
4th floor. $8-$10.
This week, it should be clear to Portlanders that Lucy Guerin
has arrived as a choreographer: While PICA brings her company
to town to unveil her new piece, Heavy, Mikhail Baryshnikov
will be performing another of her works at the Schnitz. Dance
companies around the world are seeking the Australian-born
New Yorker for commissioned pieces; they have discovered that
her powerful representations of the subconscious draw audiences
in.
"One of the areas that dance can successfully explore is
the stranger, less graspable [parts] of the human psyche,"
Guerin says. She digs into complex terrain: dream states,
memory, the extremes of emotional experience. Guerin's piece
Venus Bay, about the deceptive nature of memory,
draws from her childhood on her family's sheep farm in Australia,
where kangaroos and sheep were regularly slaughtered. Two
Lies delves into similarly fertile soil, exploring the
differences between events themselves and the nebulous quality
of remembering.
Guerin's movements are as abstract as her themes; you won't
find a literal narrative in her dances. From intricate Balinese
hand gestures and elastic, fluid lines to distorted jerking
and joints cocked at odd angles, her motions and their layered
meanings invite multiple interpretations. Guerin loves to
play with contrast, expressing paradox and duality (light/dark,
soft/hard) through the body. Dancers embody opposing physical
states--rigid and malleable, doll-like and sensual.
Less abstract than most of her pieces, Heavy navigates
the subconscious realms of sleep and dreams from both a
personal and a clinical perspective. "When I started the
work, my main interest was from a structural point of view,"
Guerin says. "I liked the framework of the sleep stages,
that idea of descent through the four stages into REM, this
sleeping, dreaming stage."
As Guerin did more research, she got interested in disorders
and what happens when the sleeping function goes awry. By
the end of the piece's development, she'd become fascinated
with another aspect of sleep: clinical research. "Patients
are wired up with electrodes and plugged in," she says.
"They have their brain waves and muscle and eye movements
monitored, but it's obvious to anyone who's ever been asleep
that there's a whole other world there--dreaming--which
no one's been able to record. The tangible, scientific aspect--contrasted
with that completely elusive, more psychological dream world--ended
up being the basis for the work."
Guerin conjures an active dream state on stage, with DJ
Jad Macadam providing live sonic manipulations in response
to the dancers' movements. The four dancers--Trevor Patrick,
Rebecca Hilton, Ros Warby and David Tyndall--traverse the
nocturnal landscape, while three sleepers clothed in white
lie behind a large metal screen punctured with small windows.
On an oversized scroll behind the dancers, a polygraph needle
maps brain activity. Nonsensical dreams and a spectrum of
nightmares unfold before us, from the fairly innocuous (being
late for a plane) to the terrifying (a dancer lies prone
while another perches atop her body like a malevolent incubus).
Is Guerin commenting on the dual nature of real experience
vs. the mind as analytical observer? Or is Heavy
a comment on the inadequacies of science and its inability
to explain human psychology?
Such lack of an overt message has led to misinterpretation
of Guerin's work. Her choreography has been described as
sexual, with female dancers exposing their pantied crotches
or butts, but Guerin insists there's no subtext, political
or sexual. "I haven't been deliberately trying to present
the female in any particular way," she says. "I don't feel
a really strong identity as a woman. I'm more interested
in talking about the individual human being." Guerin says
the images that have been interpreted as sexual are really
about opposing emotions. "There's a tussle between wanting
to expose myself but at the same time wanting to remain
aloof. I don't express myself a lot through emotional or
facial expression, but the movements are often quite vulnerable
or strange. I find it interesting, that line between coldness
and excitement, vulnerability and exposure."
As Heavy's intrigue with the conscious and the subconscious
makes clear, duality continues to propel Guerin's work.
"There's a dialogue between [extremes]," she says. "The
territory that exists between them is what I find fascinating,
and that's inspired me to work in dance."
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 26, 1999
|
