Theatre and Dance Platform

Described by Felber as “a music/theatrical installation for seven voices” this work explores the liminal zones at the edges of sculpture, painting, dance, sound art through a playful reinscription of Ad Reinhardt’s 25 Lines Of Words On Art: Statement of 1958 into a late 20th century hybrid aesthetic combining retro fit design invoking both earlier avant gardes and contemporary cutting edge graphics. The audience enters a Futurist mise en scene of huge swinging steel rods with light bulbs at the end of them and 7 steel tubes suspended from the ceiling each broadcasting one of the voices from Elliott Gyger’s composition. But one of the most effective elements is the video projection of Lucy Guerin’s 3 movement pieces which haunt the space silently, interrogating the audience from the floor beneath their feet.

The opening of the event featured a live performance from Guerin, one of Australia’s most sought after dancers, whose choreography also echoed elements of the Reinhardt text (#16 verticality and horizontality, rectilinearity, parallelism, stasis). The space (not designed for live arts) was absolutely packed which meant that for most of the performance parts of the audience were unsighted. This resulted in a strange theatre of frustration where members of the audience shrugged their shoulders, huffed and puffed, rolled their eyes, unconsciously entering the piece as they unexpectedly reacquired their bodies in the absence of a line of sight. Reinhardt would have loved it…#24 the completest control for the purest spontaneity. 

Though all the disparate elements of the work arise from a reading of the Reinhardt text, no attempt has been made to force them into a hokey mimetic relationship. They simply accompany each other and gaze at each other disinterestedly, allowing room for an audience to move, at least in an intellectual sense…The piece is accompanied by a beautifully finished book which features interviews with the artists and reproductions of Felber’s images, stills from Guerin’s dances and the musical scores for the 25 songs with a CD. Credit Suisse (among others) sponsored this piece and you can see where the money went! Thankfully it has been put to good use.

Mixing experts and amateurs has surprising results, writes Harbant Gill

STAND on one leg, close your eyes and then look up before you head out to catch choreographer Lucy Guerin's latest creation. 

That's the advice of Guerin herself, who hopes it will give audiences a sense of how difficult such tasks are for two untrained dancers. 

Guerin has put dance pros Byron Perry and Antony Hamilton next to visual artists Simon Obarzanek and Ross Coulter in her Untrained. 

The team has come up with instructions, unseen to the audience, that the performers must follow. 

They ``do a stag leap'', ``take off your T-shirt and put it on'', ``eat a biscuit'' and ``draw a portrait of the person opposite you'', for example. 

The results are always interesting, sometimes hilarious. 

Guerin has done it in part to find ``original movement'' after decades of working with a dance vocabulary. 

``The main reason is I really love the movement of ordinary people when they dance,'' Guerin says. 

``Dancers are amazing but when you are used to that form and you see an untrained person dancing, there are positions you never come across. 

``There are freshness and immediacy that I find fascinating especially when contrasted with the dancer's awareness, which can never really be dropped. 

``As the process has evolved, the piece has become a filter through which we explore . . . a lot of it is very personal and you get to know a lot about the individual. It's also taught me not to take for granted what the dancers can do physically.'' 

Guerin chose men because they ``generally have a more difficult time dancing and feeling comfortable in their bodies''. 

Five weeks of hilarity and male-bonding rehearsals have led to an engaging piece in which the raw pair reveal more of themselves because they don't have the performer persona to hide behind. 

Audiences are able to put themselves in the shoes of the untrained for the hour-long piece. 

How did Guerin entice the untrained pair to make this courageous move and show their vulnerability? 

Obarzanek, photographer brother of Guerin's partner Gideon, was ``tricked''. 

``Lucy said it's going to be very slow and easy, we won't push you too hard,'' he protests. 

``I love dancing at parties and thought `imagine getting paid to dance!' But as time went on it wasn't that easygoing. 

``She'd turned up the temperature; by then we were in too deep.'' 

OBARZANEK was in agony for 10 days after pushing himself too hard, at a time when ``just to stretch out and touch my toes was tricky''. 

He didn't resort to secret lessons with his brother, who is the artistic director of dance company Chunky Move, but simply worked out his limits. Then he discovered the joy of working with a team. 

``They seem to have a happier disposition than artists who work on their own most of the time,'' Obarzanek says. 

``I've actually become a bit happier through working with the body and being around other people. We're not trying to perform as dancers, we are trying to be ourselves. Being truthful to yourself is integral to the work. 

``The biggest challenge is how to keep a straight face while the audience is laughing.'' 

see > Untrained, Arts House, Meat Market, Blackwood St, North Melbourne, March 11-14. Tickets: $25/$18. Bookings: 9639 0096. It is part of the Dance Massive festival which runs until March 15. Visit www.dancemassive.com.au

THREE pictures recur in images of the West Gate Bridge: the snaking line of the structure as seen from above, joining the two sides of the Yarra; the half-built elevated roadway leading into thin air during its construction; and the twisted rubble of the same roadway after it fell 58 metres to the river below.

Connection, construction, collapse. Next Friday, October 15, is the 40th anniversary of the disaster that killed 35 men and grievously injured almost 20 others, but the story is far from fading in the city's memory. 

Kate Luciano, curator of the Public Records Office of Victoria's new exhibition on the collapse, says the bridge changed the city of Melbourne, and the collapse is intertwined with its story.

Without the bridge, Luciano says, the city's west — the newer suburbs and industrial zones along the ring road, those down towards Geelong and Geelong itself — would be very different, and much less developed.

The bridge was typical of the ambitious concrete structures going up in modern cities around the world. It was conceived as a grand project to transform Melbourne — the men who worked on the bridge were extremely proud to work there, and their children would boast about their father's construction job.

It's that significance to the city, Luciano says, that makes the collapse much more than Australia's worst industrial accident. If it had happened on an office tower site, it would be a footnote to history, but even Melburnians born well after the event know about the collapse. 

The exhibition, at the Old Treasury Building, draws on the report of the royal commission that followed the disaster, which pointed the finger at animosity between the three companies working on the bridge, and, to a lesser extent, at union rules. 

Oral histories were collected from survivors and their families especially for the exhibition. The weathered faces and broad accents of the Australians in the videos — men and women born here, or immigrants from Italy and Ireland — contrast with the official record of negligence by overconfident superiors. There's something of the Gallipoli legend in the story — a sense of pointless sacrifice. 

The images of the rescue effort, too, have a whiff of the trenches about them: the workers themselves were the rescue crew, digging in the mud for their mates. In archival photographs, grim men carry injured comrades on stretchers, while other stretchers are covered with sheets. Men sit against fences like rag dolls, with white bandages around their heads and arms, and there's a general air of shock.

The day also hasn't faded for those who were there. One worker told Luciano: "The shaking continued and I knew something had to be wrong. The bridge started to sink . . . It was like slow motion . . . The next thing I knew I was under the water . . . All around me I could see people. All hurt. All pieces."

To tell the story from a wider perspective, Luciano has collected artworks, including several pastel-toned strip-shaped gouaches by Fred Williams, which show the bridge half-constructed, to the point where it collapsed. Williams's widow, Lyn, said the artist planned to paint the length of the river, but after the collapse, he "lost heart in the project".

Another painting, by Victorian artist Tony Lloyd, shows the bridge's massive supporting pylons and the roadway from underneath, cutting through a blood-red sky.

Newspaper reports of the time have been pasted together to create a wall of words, as "a way of presenting a huge amount of information, but also emotional information", Luciano says.

Not in the exhibition are countless other references to the bridge in popular culture: artist Rick Amor sketched metalworkers there in the 1970s and painted it repeatedly in his waterfront series; Don Henderson and Mark Seymour made it a topic of their songs, as did independent band Sleepy Township.

A lesser-known bridge song came from vaudeville performer Edna "Elsa Phar Lap" Davis, who was getting on in years when the redesigned bridge was opened in 1978, but made a special effort to sing and dance her way up the empty lanes at the opening with her self-penned Mighty West Gate Bridge March, accompanied by the RAAF band. Earlier, resplendent in sequins and heavy make-up, Davis had declared the bridge better than the pyramids, and certainly better than Sydney's bridge, because it was longer. "What a wonderful effort it is for mankind to build anything like this," she told Mike Willesee.

Davis was "totally nuts", Luciano says with a laugh, and the footage of her performances is a lighter note in the tribute to the bridge workers.

Across town at the Police Museum, newly discovered photographs of the aftermath of the collapse are also on show. And at Monash University's engineering faculty, several massive pieces of twisted metal are kept in the gardens.

"We usually take our visiting professors down there [for] a sobering thought of what can happen," says the faculty's Emeritus Professor Paul Grundy. The pieces, some up to three by four metres of structural steel, "are all distorted and twisted and tattered and torn".

Luciano says that bridge building sites around the world were shut down after the West Gate collapse, and the royal commission report sold out in minutes as engineers internationally tried to understand what went wrong.

"People didn't understand what was going on [structurally]," Grundy says. "The West Gate was probably the most notorious of all the collapses."

The only good to come out of the collapse, Luciano says, was the better understanding of and the dramatic improvements in workplace safety and post-incident procedures. At the time, the workers themselves spent all day and night digging for their mates in the mud and rubble. Then, as one survivor told the interviewers: "The bridge collapsed on the Thursday, we got sacked on the Tuesday and then we started going to funerals." Because the site was shut down, the workers lost their jobs with no compensation or counselling; it took a public outcry for that to happen, and a proper memorial park was not opened until 2004.

The story of the men who fell while trying to reshape the city keeps reappearing — Melbourne choreographer Lucy Guerin took the ideas of physical tension and collapse in her 2006 bridge-themed dance Structure and Sadness, which was restaged at Malthouse earlier this year. Peter Temple's multi-award-winning novel Truth opens with two policemen on the West Gate, one telling the other how his grandfather survived the collapse: "Never go over here without thinking," he says, going on to say his grandfather "rode the dunny all the way down". 

A few men did "ride it down", Luciano says, including one who had been shepherded into a lift by a friend who stayed on the bridge and died minutes later. 

But 35 men died, and that, as much as the importance of the bridge itself is, Luciano says, why anyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were when it happened: "It was a September 11 moment for Melbourne." 

West Gate Bridge Collapse: 40 years on runs from October 15 to March 27 at the Old Treasury Building. Disaster at West Gate: Images From the Police Archives until January 7 at the Victoria Police Museum, World Trade Centre. 

Jenny Sinclair is the author of When We Think About Melbourne. 

So you think you can't dance

Lucy Guerin Inc is on the hunt for two men to join the company as paid dancers in an upcoming tour to Denmark. The catch: no dance training allowed. Guerin's show, Untrained, has enjoyed several incarnations around the world, with a pair of professional dancers met onstage by two inexperienced performers who try to match the motions of their skilled counterparts. The point isn't to humiliate the amateur movers but to examine what happens when the same choreography is played out through different body types, and how the dancers' personalities are affected by their training. The tour is in September, and performers will have to be available for a full week of rehearsals in late August. 

lucyguerininc.com 

Dancemakers' chance to show off 

Finalists for Australia's first major prize for dancemakers were announced last week. The inaugural Keir Choreographic Award saw 77 entries whittled down to eight, each of which has been commissioned to produce work for a season at Melbourne's Dancehouse in July. The contenders include dancers, choreographers and visual artists, and the range of styles and backgrounds is an encouraging one, though geographically the finalists are all Victoria or NSW-based. The line-up includes Sarah Aiken, James Batchelor, Tim Darbyshire, Matthew Day, Atlanta Eke, Shaun Gladwell, Jane McKernan and Brooke Stamp. After the season one winner will be awarded $30,000, with a further $10,000 going to an audience favourite. dancehouse.com.au. 

St Martins' new director 

St Martins Youth Arts Centre in South Yarra has made some bold strides in in recent years including works for adults created by young people. Now it has appointed Clare Watson as its new artistic director. VCA-graduate Watson is currently director-in-residence at the Malthouse Theatre and has created works for the stages of the Sydney Opera House, Melbourne Theatre Company and Arts Centre Melbourne as well as disused swimming pools, the Old Melbourne Gaol and a crumbling apartment. She intends to further St Martins' current program of expansion to include main-stage appearances and site-specific projects as well as collaborations with some of the country's finest theatre makers.

TWO trained and two untrained dancers will be pitted against one another at the Adelaide Festival in acclaimed South Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin's first work here for 10 years.

Guerin's Untrained has been programmed alongside major works by Australian and overseas companies in artistic director Paul Grabowksy's contemporary dance program. 

While Guerin works extensively in Australia and overseas with her company, Lucy Guerin Inc, her work has not been seen in Adelaide since Robyn Archer included it in her program for the 2000 Festival. 

Untrained last year premiered in Melbourne, where Guerin now lives. 

``I really planned it as a development or experimental exercise and wasn't thinking it would necessarily become a performance,'' Guerin said. 

``It's a very stripped-back work, not the sort of thing you normally expect to see when you go to dance, and I thought audiences might find it a bit dry. 

``But they loved it. It turned out to be one of the most accessible and funny pieces I've done. 

``As well as finding it quite humorous, people imagine what it would be like if it were them up on stage. There's a real sympathy and admiration for the untrained performers.'' 

The untrained dancers are visual artists. Simon Obarzanek, is the brother of Gideon Obarzanek, a well-known Melbourne choreographer and Guerin's partner of 11 years. 

The other is photographer Ross Coulter, who joins professional dancers Anthony Hamilton and Byron Perry in the work. 

``The beauty of the untrained dancers is their special untrained ability,'' Guerin said. 

Guerin graduated from the Centre for the Performing Arts, now Adelaide College of the Arts, in 1982. She moved to New York in 1989 and spent seven years dancing with companies there. 

``I'm very excited about showing something of what I've been doing in my home town, although it's very different to the works I usually make,'' she said. 

Her plans for Untrained include a regional tour in 2010 and 2011, possibly extending to SA and recruiting local people to appear in the show. 

``We might end up with plumbers or farmers or sportspeople taking the roles of the untrained dancers,'' she said. 

Untrained will be performed at Adelaide Centre for the Arts from February 24 to 28. Bookings through BASS. 

A new event celebrates Melbourne's reputation as a dance capital, writes Robin Usher.

MELBOURNE is Australia's capital of contemporary dance and our dance companies tour internationally more than other art forms, but until now there has been nothing to celebrate this vibrancy. 

Dance Massive is designed to bring companies and dancers together under one banner. 

Performances over the 12 days from March 3 will include groups from around the country, as well as Melbourne-based Chunky Move with Gideon Obarzanek's latest international hit, Mortal Engine. 

"It has been touring constantly since it premiered at the Sydney Festival last year and went on to the Edinburgh Festival," says Steven Richardson, artistic director of Melbourne's Arts House and the driving force behind Dance Massive. 

"Melbourne's contemporary dance infrastructure is the envy of almost every other city in Australia but there is nothing to celebrate it except the annual programming of the Melbourne (International Arts) Festival," he says. "The time is propitious to try to create a platform to showcase the art form nationally." 

His plan is to make the event biennial and develop the program further in 2011 and 2013. 

"We made a national call for expressions of interest this year and were inundated with responses," he says at his Arts House headquarters in the old North Melbourne town hall. 

The organisation also hosts events at the Meat Market in North Melbourne and both venues will be part of Dance Massive. 

Other groups - Malthouse Theatre, Ausdance and Dancehouse - joined in to make the event possible. Richardson is especially pleased to see contemporary dance being regularly programmed at the Malthouse, which will host Chunky Move and Brisbane's Splintergroup. 

The Queensland company is little known in Melbourne but its two works in the program have both toured internationally. Lawn, which will be seen at the Malthouse's Merlyn Theatre, was conceived in Berlin and developed at Brisbane Powerhouse before going to Singapore and Germany. Roadkill was included in London's Dance Umbrella at the Barbican Centre in 2007 and will be performed at the Meat Market. 

Choreographer Lucy Guerin will also appear at the Meat Market with a new work, Untrained, which pairs two specialised dancers with two untrained ones. 

"It's terrific to have Lucy and Gideon (Obarzanek) in the program because it lifts the profile to have their work appearing," Richardson says. He has a background in dance and was on the Australia Council's dance board for more than five years, as well as working with Circus Oz. He says Dance Massive will be the first opportunity for companies to present full-length works together since Melbourne's Greenmill Dance Project, which ran for six years until 1998. 

Six overseas presenters will be here for Dance Massive thanks to $30,000 from the Australia Council. "It's not about setting up a retail model but rather establishing relationships with local artists and international agents," Richardson says. 

Arts Victoria is also providing $50,000 to the project. 

Richardson believes the potential audience for contemporary dance is huge, and expects the Meat Market's 180 Seconds in (Disco) Heaven or Hell on Sunday March 8 to attract an enthusiastic audience. 

It will combine local choreographers working with groups specialising in ballroom, breaking and different sorts of ethnic dances. 

"There will be a party atmosphere and many varieties of dance," Richardson says. "I think that leads to a more meaningful experience than passively sitting in a seat in the theatre." 

Dance Massive runs from March 3 to 15 at the Malthouse Theatre, Arts House and Dancehouse. Go 

to dancemassive.com.au or book on 9685 5111.

Opera is regarded as the most lavish and expensive art form, as shown by the top price of $1500 for tickets to see the four works in Adelaide's $15million production of Wagner's Ring Cycle. But opera-goers in Melbourne have the chance to see a production that relies on a small cast and orchestra, rather than a budget-busting set, to establish direct, emotional contact with the audience.

"It's a very pared-back form," says Patrick Nolan, director of Opera Australia's last show in its spring season, Baroque Masterworks. 

The two works in the double bill, by Monteverdi and Purcell, come from soon after the birth of opera at the dawn of the 17th century. 

"The baroque style is minimal and direct compared to what came later," he says. "The 21st century couldn't be more different, where we are used to layers of meaning piled on top of each other." 

The production is part of a boom in baroque music-making in Melbourne, including critically acclaimed performances by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Italy's Il Giardino Armonico. 

Nolan, known for his elegant and concise direction, says his challenge is to allow the directness of the emotional approach to come through. 

"It is very spacious music and it has been a remarkable process working with the singers to peel back the layers," he says. 

The production opens with Monteverdi's 30-minute masterpiece, IlCombattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, followed by Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, which is the first opera to have been sung in English. This ordering allows the evening to conclude with Dido's lament, which Nolan describes as one of opera's most well known songs. 

"The chorus follows with a lament that is some of the most sublime music ever written," he says, quoting: "With drooping wings, Cupids come and scatter roses on the tomb". 

Nolan says Purcell is speaking through time, reminding people that the pain of love "has always been and will always be". 

The opera is adapted from the chapter in The Aenead in which Aeneas (Angus Wood), the mythical founder of Rome, is washed up on the shores of Carthage where he falls in love with Dido (Deborah Humble). 

But Nolan says the opera makes Dido the main character. This allows her to sing her own death after her lover departs, contrasting with the starkness of the original, in which Aeneas looks back from his departing ship and sees the smoke of Dido's funeral pyre following her suicide. 

The opera was written in 1689, during the flowering of the arts in England in the era following the rule of Cromwell's puritans. Nolan says Purcell was aware of Monteverdi's works from earlier in the century because a copy he made of a score by the Italian has survived. 

Monteverdi's Orfeo, written in 1601, is regarded as the first opera. When he came to write Il Combattimento 23 years later, he developed a revolutionary style of music-making that mirrored the drama of the story. 

The story is taken from Tasso's long poem on the Crusades and tells of a Christian warrior, Tancredi (Han Lim) who falls in love with a Muslim warrior maiden (Ali McGregor) before later killing her in a duel. 

"She knew who he was, but because she wore an armoured visor, he didn't know who he was fighting," Nolan says. 

But, he says, because the action is described by a narrator (Wood), he wanted to find a way to dramatise the fight on stage. "Because the battle to the death is so intense, I wanted to see bodies going for it," he says. So he asked Lucy Guerin to choreograph the combat. The opera is over in less than 30 minutes, but Nolan says the two dancers are called on to work hard, and he also employs them in the Purcell work after interval. 

He says the beauty of the Monteverdi work is that the key issues are hidden: armour masks beauty, war conceals love and human strife is only the foreground to eternal peace. 

But stage direction is just one of Nolan's interests. Having directed the Paul Grabowsky/Joanna Murray-Smith 2002 opera, Love in the Age of Therapy, he is planning to film a documentary on the lives of Aboriginal singers Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter. This follows his direction of the 2004 Melbourne Festival show, Kura Tungar, with the two singers and Grabowsky's Australian Art Orchestra. 

A short film that Nolan wrote and directed in 1998, 389, was a finalist in Tropfest and screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival. 389 is about a bus route and a frustrated poet who hijacks a vehicle in order to find an audience for his poems. 

Because of his deep regard for him, he gained permission from the former dissident Czech poet, Miroslav Holub, to use one of his works.