The Double Life Of Lucy

LUCY Guerin sits curled and comfortable with her body as a little girl and speaks in that light voice of a dancer.

"I am starting to worry more. In the beginning, the worry was `I am not going to be a choreographer'. Got over that. Now the worry is, `will this piece be good?'"

Yet Gideon Obarzanek wants to work with her, she has just won a dance award for her Two Lies in New York, and the dance fund of the Australia Council has given her almost $29,000 to develop a full evening work. Still she is worried. Of course she is worried. Tonight is the premiere at the Seymour Centre of her new dance work, Remote - on the surface about the way we respond to TV, but underneath, what all Guerin's work is about, the double nature of all things.

Back home after seven years in New York, Guerin, 36, is yet really to land. She planned to settle in Melbourne, but as soon as she arrived, Guerin bounced right back, on tours to New York, London, Rotterdam and Paris, then up to Sydney for Remote, commissioned by the One Extra Company.

While she retains her Australian accent, her spiritual home seems to be Greenwich Village's contemporary dance circuit, from the Joyce Theatre to the Kitchen, where her Two Lies and Robbery Waitress on Bail were performed last April. Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt found them "beautiful, thoughtful work".

She lived in the Village but did she ever go uptown? "No never! We downtown dancers never went above 14th Street. That's the joke, but it's like that. I do miss the [New York] dance community, but the climate there is getting so harsh and difficult. I couldn't see anyone going anywhere as a role model and it's so hard for choreographers and dancers financially. I could stay there for another 10 years and still wait tables."

Instead she survives on Australian government grants and commissions from companies such as One Extra and Obarzanek's Chunky Move.

Guerin also returned home to be closer to her parents in South Australia. Her father, a retired civil engineer, in mid-life decided to yank the family from Adelaide to a remote sheep station, Courtabie, where little Lucy's impressionable mind absorbed the brutally short life and death of farm animals.

For her parents, the sheep farm didn't work out, but those days inspired Geurin's Two Lies, originally titled Courtabie 1966.

Back in Adelaide, Guerin was an honours student at ballet school, though not the teacher's favourite. "I think I was too vague." After school she was accepted by Adelaide's Centre for Performing Arts. Her first piece of choreography was Sweet Dreams, in 1989. Her 10th, Remote, is a departure. It's the first time she's worked with male dancers as well as female, and she is not dancing in it herself.

"I like that. It's great. It's too much to be worried about the inside and outside."

Remote, part of a One Extra double bill with Garry Stewart's Fugly, is about "how we interact with TV, the way we watch it, about channel surfing, the contrast between watching TV and what you see on TV . . . and how that can be a replacement for experience.

"I am very interested in duality. Most of my pieces have two aspects, two points of view. My new work for Gideon will be about sleep. Sleep is one of my favourite things because it suggests alternative realities."

When she choreographs "there are two lines of thought - one going on in front of my mind and one from the back, which is much more instinctive. Once I've organised the framework, I can trust to let the unconscious work. That's where the movement vocabulary comes from, the prehistoric side, the back brain, the brain stem. You never know what's in there," she says. And Guerin does not look worried at all, but intrigued at the mystery of what lies in that cave.