NEWRETRO Comes to Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in March

Lucy Guerin Inc in partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) presents NEWRETRO at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). Performances are Saturday 25 March - Sunday 2 April 2023.

The performance is led by Choreographer & Director Lucy Guerin. Dancers: Alice Dixon, Amber McCartney, Antony Hamilton, Benjamin Hancock, Caitlin Mewett, Claire Leske, Cora Hughes, Deanne Butterworth, Geoffrey Watson, Georgia Rudd, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Lee Serle, Lilian Steiner, Melanie Lane, Michelle Heaven, Ngioka Bunda-Heath, Raina Peterson, Rebecca Jensen, Samantha Hines, Stephanie Halyburton, Tra Mi Dinh.

Melbourne's award-winning dance company Lucy Guerin Inc (LGI) presents NEWRETRO, an epic new performance installation by leading Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin celebrating the company's 21st anniversary-part of the inaugural FRAME: A biennial of dance.

Drawing on fragments and excerpts from 21 dance works from LGI's impressive archive, NEWRETRO takes the form of a captivating three-hour, site-responsive work inhabiting the iconic 21-year-old galleries of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA).

NEWRETRO features a cast of 21 exceptional dancers-some reprising their original roles and others joining the company for the first time. Representing the past, present and future of Australian dance artists side-by-side, the work strives to capture physical memory, ephemeral lineages and the dancer's embodied knowledge.

The ACCA galleries will frame the performers in a singular relationship to architecture and the spectator, creating a compelling experience at once intimate and spectacular. As the performance unfolds, audiences are free to roam and may come and go-following their curiosity, seeking out details and taking in the space as a constantly shifting whole.

Whilst reflective in its genesis, NEWRETRO defies description as a retrospective, bringing past ideas and different generations into a new relationship to the present moment-a living archive built from a synthesis of ideas, movement material, and choreographic processes. It is an exhilarating celebration of the dancers, the artform and the company.

Lucy Guerin on NEWRETRO: "The making of NEWRETRO has been exhilarating and occasionally confronting as the past meets the present. Having several generations of dancers in the same room at the same time is like a living archive, where the physical imprints of all the dancers I have worked with come together as a single body of work. Themes and ideas that have recurred throughout my choreographic process, bring together different materials, generations, dance lineages and performance styles to reveal recurring themes and wildly contrasting physicalities. It's thrilling to see the artistry and focus that this glorious cast brings into one space. The galleries at ACCA create a new frame for the audience to experience a constantly morphing structure of movement and the vast embodiment of knowledge that is at the core of my choreography."