VIEW FROM THE STILL POINT

DANCE

29 Mar

Recently landed: View from the Still Point

Gracia’s written response to A Lucy Guerin Inc production, NEWRETRO, presented in partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, especially for Fjord Review.

You can fit a lot into three hours. You can span, if you have the reach and vision of choreographer Lucy Guerin, 21-years in a performance installation at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). A Lucy Guerin Inc production, presented in partnership with ACCA, as part of Frame: a biennial of dance, NEWRETRO is 21 works, for 21 dancers, 21 years in the making. It is a recreation, rather than a retrospective, remixed from what was into what is, because this is as much about what the next 21 years might hold as it is about the wealth and expression of the previous 21 years. Propelled ever forward, Guerin offers forth an exhilarating reconstruction meets endurance, for how else can you fit all the hours within 21 years into a gallery space on a Saturday afternoon.

The collage of NEWRETRO is not in the familiar black box setting of theatre, nor is it a survey exhibition in the white cube framework of a gallery. Instead, it fuses the two, to present a theatre in which you, the audience, have no black space to seek refuge within, and a gallery in which you, in the role of the viewer, can navigate as you please, if you are mindful of the ever-changing, expansive perimeters of the moving installation. And move it did, as a verb, to go in a specified direction, and in the sense of the strong feelings it evoked in me.

At times, during the continuous three-hour performance of NEWRETRO, Gallery One called to mind a studio setting, as the audience, though free to come and go as they pleased, sought vantage nooks for themselves and slid down the walls. I, too, settled in, like a ringtail possum who’d discovered a vacant nesting box. If I vacate this spot, will I find another just as good? For a three-hour performance, wall space is premium. I committed to a spot, going against the intended wish in the choreographic notes[i] for NEWRETRO to be something you stand, observe, and interpret, as per a gallery, and through the act of dipping in and out, make your own collage, Make Your Own World Visible (2019), from the offerings throughout the enormity of ACCA. I, like those to my left and right, made a theatre of a gallery. Or, rather, was it an investment, a commitment to the unfolding performance and the performers? Perhaps driven by a fear of missing a gesture or the imperceptible, though very much felt, building of momentum. The invitation of a cathartic moment proved too great an allurement. Does experiencing dance, in my instance, require me to be still? Is that an important part of how I read dance? Is it akin to hearing the flit of wrens and pardalotes in the mid canopy only when you pause mid-walk? Is it a key part of attentiveness? When you are less noisy so as to hear the world around you. When you let go of your own sense of self, do you encounter the work fully, and unencumbered?

[i] Please note: audience members are free to roam and may come and go during the performance, NEWRETRO, Lucy Guerin Inc, https://lucyguerininc.com/works/newretro, accessed 25th March, 2023.