LUCY GUERIN INC.

DANCE

21 Oct

Recently landed: Lucy Guerin Inc.

Gracia’s written response to Lucy Guerin’s Place Dances, especially for Fjord Review.

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At the end of the year, Lucy Guerin will step down as founding artistic director of Lucy Guerin Inc, with Melanie Lane to take the helm in 2027, and a new company name to be revealed.[i] In the crossing over of states, Guerin is also presenting a new solo work created on and for herself. “In returning to perform herself for the first time in thirteen years, Guerin embodies what it looks like to remain a practising artist across a lifetime.”[ii] As such, Place Dances, in the white cube of Buxton Contemporary on a Friday evening, is a “live reckoning with sixty years of dance thinking, made visible in the body that has done the thinking.”

Between exhibitions at Buxton, in one of the smaller gallery spaces, a projection of Guerin’s first choreographed solo work, Irresistible Divide,[iii] performed in New York in 1990, graces the walls. Pulling up forms from the past, in the transition of things, it feels as though Place Dances has already begun. Or rather, it feels like one large, continuous, dancing loop, from Irresistible Divide to now. As the crowd gathers before the glass door to the main gallery where the performance will officially unfurl, Guerin’s New York past-self is preparing to dissolve into present-day in the beautiful recurrence of themes. And perhaps present-day Guerin is also retracing her steps, repeating patterns, traversing over something that happened, and seeing what unfolds.

[i] Melanie Lane Appointed Incoming Artistic Director of Lucy Guerin Inc’, 1st October, 2026, Lucy Guerin Inc website, https://lucyguerininc.com/news/announcement-melanie-lane-appointed-incoming-artistic-director, accessed 16th October, 2026

[ii] Place Dances synopsis, Lucy Guerin Inc website, https://lucyguerininc.com/works/place-dances#performances, accessed 17th October, 2026

[iii] Lucy Guerin Inc shared a fragment of Irresistible Divide on their Instagram account, https://www.instagram.com/p/DefTIsCkXk0/?img_index=2, accessed 17th October, 2026