PLACE DANCES to Return to the Stage at Buxton Contemporary
The solo work features sound design by Alisdair Macindoe, lighting by Paul Lim, and dramaturgy by Kate Davis.
Australian dancer and choreographer Lucy Guerin will perform PLACE DANCES, at Buxton Contemporary from 15 to 18 October. This new solo work arrives at a significant moment. After twenty-five years as the founding Artistic Director of Lucy Guerin Inc, Guerin has announced that she will step down from the role at the end of 2026. 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.
Place Dances is a live reckoning with sixty years of dance thinking, made visible in the body that has done that thinking. At a time when older performers remain significantly underrepresented on world stages, she returns to the most exposed and intimate form available to a choreographer: the solo. For audiences — dancers and non-dancers alike — this is a rare chance to witness the full arc of a life in dance.
'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. Place Dances locates me in relation to rooms, studios, theatres and galleries, but also in abstract and imagined places where the dancer might situate movement. As I continued my exploration of dance, I became more and more attracted to its ephemeral aspects. The dancer moving not with an imposed meaning or character, but as a vessel filled with a multiplicity of information, complex and fluid, and only visible through embodiment.' -Lucy Guerin
Place Dances begins in lecture form, reflecting on Guerin's ongoing choreographic preoccupations with dance. It moves from a precise articulation of her work through language, into the physical expression through her body at a moment in time. It is not about the past, but about a present understanding of the effects of sixty years of dance thinking, making and doing.
Charlotte Day, Director, Potter Museum of Art and Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne said: We are delighted to welcome Lucy Guerin Inc to Buxton Contemporary for the premiere of this remarkable new work by one of Australia's most outstanding choreographers at a pivotal moment in her practice. Putting artists first, supporting new work, and utilising our galleries as spaces of creation, experimentation and performance is what makes Buxton special. This project demonstrates the exciting possibilities that emerge when contemporary dance and visual art meet.
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