Going places
Places Dance
Lucy Guerin
Friday 16th October, 2026
Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne
With post-performance talk
Choreography & Performance: Lucy Guerin
Dramaturgy & Costume Design: Kate Davis
Sound Design & Composition: Alisdair Macindoe
Lighting Design: Paul Lim
This project has been supported by Buxton Contemporary at the University of Melbourne, the Sidney Myer Fund and Lucy Guerin Inc’s Commissioning Circle. This presentation would not have been possible without the generous support of the late Chloe Munro AO, Terry Wu and WXYZ Studios.
Lucy Guerin Inc., my response to Lucy Guerin’s Place Dances, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
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[i], and a new company name to be revealed. 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.
Dressed in black, Guerin sits in the gallery, thinking, waiting, as the audience files into the space, changing the atmosphere, charging the formerly meditative space with the electricity of anticipation and of-the-day chatter. While the audience assumes their agreed positions, along two opposing sides of the gallery, Guerin remains focussed as places are found. Perhaps waiting for a hush to descend, for the next chapter, for the overlapping of time to settle. In an inward and private world made visible, this full circle moment is Guerin’s public return to the performing body. Presently, she stands and walks through the doors to a second adjoining room. In doing so, the place we, the audience, are assembled now reveals itself to be backstage. Unbeknownst to me, I’d been privy to a contemplative moment, in the green room, to the state of before.
In the neighbouring room, we hear the Director of Buxton, Charlotte Day, introduce Guerin to an unseen audience from an unseen stage. We hear Guerin conduct her lecture. She is speaking about her work in her down-to-earth, engaging manner. It will become one of many voices in Place Dances. Audible, in part, recognisable in pattern and tone, but happening, over there, in another place. I hear her speaking about her career, with personal anecdotes, but I miss much, seated, over here in the gallery. And the distance this creates is delicious. Waiting in the ‘wrong’ spot is the right spot.
I had found my place in the familiarity of the gallery setting all too easily. I had thought myself clever for positioning myself between the flat-sided columns. I had not banked on an imaginary, second theatre materialising in the gallery. And just as a place can be a physical location, Guerin reminds me, place exists in the imagination. As Guerin re-enters the room, the version of her giving an address remains (as an audio recording). With the door closed, speaking Guerin is muffled, but undeterred, in flight. The past — New York Guerin and Lecture Guerin — is layered under the present and the shape of it always comes through, even, or rather especially if you wallpaper over it. Guerin is spooling through her private and public archive, and making something new. The pas de deux has become a pas de trois, but not in the conventional sense. As Guerin later discusses in a post-performance Q&A, facilitated by Director of Performance Review, Anador Walsh, a pas de deux shows parts of the one person, as opposed to signalling a relationship.
To Place Dances Guerin adds further parts of herself, further places, further voices. She addresses the audience, and sometimes she gives voice to what appears to be her internal thought processes. Just as places, our memories of them, our experience of them, our telling of them, are never solid, composed of various pieces, they shift swiftly, emulating and of life. As Guerin speaks in conversation with herself, part said in real time, part to another overhead recording of herself speaking, this time in the same room, she comments, with the same frankness, “why haven’t you finished this already? Other people would have finished by now. You’re taking too long.” “I know. But it’s really hard.” “You always say that, but if it is really hard, why do you keep doing it?” “Because sometimes it’s like cutting wood, piling logs, restacking, and it keeps tumbling down, and other times a space opens up in my mind. And it all falls into place and it feels amazing.”[iv] Place can also be in relation to forms around you. Your place in the world. What is your place in relation to history? In relation to those around you?
Having moved through the space on the diagonal, the longest line of the black box, there are times when Guerin cannot be seen — by column or costume — and she playfully hides from view. Beneath a long black veil, Guerin encircles the space, her train, long and windy. A tail, in part, and a memory, it assumes its own path behind her, not merely copying. A slight deviation here and there as she moves left and right, fast and slow. As Guerin turns back to face her lineage of a tail, she aids it to form a circle, a shape perhaps the veil had never thought of assuming. She coils it around, not with her hands, but with small bodily movements. Small movements that have big responses, meanings, results. Later she lies prone on the floor, her upper body and head consumed by the very same veil, now knotted like a hood and encasement. Part caterpillar, she inches forward by propelling her body along the floor with her feet. A visual representation of the artists’ struggle, perhaps, or broader still. The embodiment of the hard slog.
Anchored by a line of pink tape Guerin has adhered to the wall on the diagonal, a reference also to dance’s eight facings of the room[v], Guerin, her body wrapped in the protection of the voluminous veil, recalls a moment from her childhood, with her sister, beneath the shearing sheds. Together they had giggled at the blood of slaughtered sheep as it dripped through the slats in the overhead floor. Guerin as a conduit of overlapping timelines relays this with candidness, as though it has just sprung to mind. She wonders at her own reaction to this moment: what did that mean? Place can be security, an identifier; place can give agency.
Place Dances is both choreographed and improvised. To Guerin, “situating the work in the expansive space of Buxton reinforces [that] … the audience shares the space with the performer and witnesses their investigation with the limits of the architecture.”[vi] At the close, the doors to the large goods lift (befitting of a gallery) slide open and Guerin steps in. She halts the doors from closing by stretching her arms forward and wriggling her fingers as she did at the beginning. Wriggling her hands in the earth to enjoy the texture. Wriggling them as if she were a diaphanometer taking a reading of the atmosphere. She disappears further back into the lift. From where I am sitting, I cannot see the final solo within the reflective box with is ghostly green light. And yet I don’t miss anything, for my mind fills in the gaps. One of the gifts of dance is perhaps this generosity of meaning and interpretation, with how it lives in those who receive it, and this need not solely be in the body of other dancers and the legacy of movement passed. It also lives in the porous vessel of the audience. It is the conversation of no fixed address. A conversation, Guerin posits, because “the gallery is the dancing place where interpretation is not always so obvious.”[vii]In the freedom of the gallery, place can be geographical coordinates, a position, a sequence. You can be in place, all over the place, in someone’s place. Digging in the historical strata around the spatial points of the gallery, looking at the layering of distinct periods, echoes from another time and one still to come emerge. You can, we can, be going places.
[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.
[iv] Recounted from memory after Lucy Guerin’s performance of Place Dances at Buxton Contemporary on Friday 16th October, 2026, so may be, like memories are, inaccurate.
[v] “I wanted to be a dancer from a very young age, and I started dance classes almost 60 years ago. When I went to my first ballet class at 6 years old, one of the first things I was taught were the 8 facings of the room. Numbered 1–8, they oriented the dancer in relation to a square room while dancing.” Lucy Guerin, Place Dances, Lucy Guerin Inc website, https://lucyguerininc.com/news/place-dances-a-solo-by-lucy-guerin, accessed 17th October, 2026.
[vi] ‘What does a practice hold over time?’, Place Dances program, Lucy Guerin Inc website, https://www.canva.com/design/DAHQR7_80ds/6sO12ky6gEriUhOmOtY2JQ/view, accessed 16th October, 2026, p. 2.
[vii] Lucy Guerin Artist’s Statement, ‘We are always relevant to place’, Place Dances program, Lucy Guerin Inc website, https://www.canva.com/design/DAHQR7_80ds/6sO12ky6gEriUhOmOtY2JQ/view, accessed 16th October, 2026, p. 3.
Image credit: Lucy Guerin in Place Dances, choreographed by Lucy Guerin, photographed by Gianna Rizzo
