HAMMER TIME
Recently landed: Hammer Time
Gracia’s written response to Lucy Guerin Inc’s One Single Action: In an Ocean of Everything, especially for Fjord Review.
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There was a series of warnings that led up to the moment it all fell apart, but no-one listened. Everything appeared to follow a linear trajectory, an illuminated, diagonal path that led straight to the suspended glass orb at the foot of the stage. But the breakdown that ensued, it was neither smooth nor gradual. And it certainly was not linear, as complex, interwoven systems sought to find an equilibrium in the aftermath. You can push things past a tipping point, easily, when armed with a three-pound mash hammer.[i] What you cannot do is push them back. The orb, once broken into pieces, cannot be reassembled. Irrespective of how much you try, you cannot reverse the transition of states.
I might be talking about Lucy Guerin’s new work, One Single Action: In an Ocean of Everything, presented at the Chunky Move Studios, as part of the new Rising festival, but I could easily be talking about climate tipping points, which, once flipped, flip another, and another, in a domino effect. As thresholds are approached, things start to flicker.[ii]The wobble before the critical transition: the first part of Guerin’s One Single Action. As a new equilibrium is found, it proves hostile to most life forms, as a rainforest becomes a savannah in the fallout: the second part of Guerin’s result of One Single Action.
Of course, this relies upon me reading the suspended white orb as planet Earth. This relies upon me reading the dancers actions as repeatedly chipping away at Earth’s stability, having failed to read the warning signs of megafires, thawing permafrost, and the death of coral reefs, driving us to the point of no return. In the inkblot interpretation of dance, in particular the non-narrative realm that Guerin likes to inhabit and reveal, perhaps the orb is the Moon, shown in beguiling luminosity. Perhaps the orb is an idea. Perhaps the orb is a system that needs to be broken in order for something new to grow in its place. Equipped as they are with a hammer, at one point, in each of their hands, the dancers, Amber McCartney and Geoffrey Watson, could be agents of destruction or performing a task necessary for renewal. As Guerin explained in the Q&A session that followed the performance, facilitated by Alison Croggon, she invites the multiple interpretations people will have as McCartney and Watson, instead of throwing a lasso around the moon, in the spirit of It’s a Wonderful Life’s George Bailey, smash both it, and ultimately themselves to smithereens.
[i] Or so the person at the hardware store thought, when I showed them a photo from the performance the following day. He swung his arm up in the air, echoing the movements of the dancers, before confirming, “yeah, I reckon you could comfortably swing a three-pound mash hammer.”
[ii] George Monbiot describing what systems theorists refer to as flickering that might suggest the approaching of tipping points, ‘The flickering’, 3rd November, 2023, https://www.monbiot.com/2023/11/03/the-flickering, accessed 15th June, 2024.
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18th of June, 2024
Lucy Guerin' Inc’s One Single Action: In an Ocean of Everything (image credit: Gregory Lorenzutti)
This project is supported by Lucy Guerin Inc’s Commissioning Circle. This presentation would not have been possible without the generous support of the late Chloe Munro AO. Lucy Guerin Inc is supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body; by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; and by the City of Melbourne.
