Some commentators have begun diagnosing texting-addicted teenagers and 20-somethings as ‘flatliners’-their lack of engagement with the spoken word turning them into the walking dead of verbal communication. When all laughs are presented as cackles, all words presented with the same intonation and there is no gestural language available, it becoms a spoken text message. Each actor then relays one of the dancers’ words, but stripped of modulation, gestures or appropriate tone.
The three actors enter, plug into an iPhone each and listen back to the conversation.
The work begins with an eight-minute improvised conversation between the three dancers, which is recorded on iPhones. Megan Holloway, Byron Perry, Kath Tonkin, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc But we are also asked to consider how both these forms-how communication itself-is affected by the iPhones’ mediations. Yes, we are at times invited to witness the gladiatorial struggle between body and voice, as though it were a battle of virtuosity where our laughter or applause determine the victor. In Conversation Piece, the juxtaposition is more complex and more ambitious. In Untrained, the juxtaposition revealed as much about the audience as it did about the men on stage what did we find engaging, funny, charming, impressive? It deftly walked the line between a celebration of naivety and experience, without falling into mawkishness or snobbery. What is the value of juxtaposition? When one places a trained body beside an untrained body, does it simply reveal that one can pirouette, the other not? When one places an actor beside a dancer, does it simply reveal that one can speak, the other move? When one places one show beside another, does it similarly reveal only the literal points of difference? Megan Holloway, Kath Tonkin, Stephanie Lake, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin Inc Conversation Piece is an experiment mediated by iPhones, which do not act as phones, but rather as audio and video recording devices, playback devices and, crucially, as signifiers of the age. Untrained was an experiment in physical performance unmediated by technology. The set for Conversation Piece is a minimalist suggestion of an anonymous waiting space-a bus terminal, a Centrelink office-with its three sets of four orange chairs echoing those in Shaun Parker’s This Show is About People (2008). The set for Untrained was simply a grey square marked out by a white line. Guerin also gradually inflects the piece with a unifying tone and a quasi-narrative based around the performers as characters rather than the performers as themselves. Conversation Piece operates with a somewhat looser form, where the performers now respond to one another’s provocations, and is leavened with choreographed intermissions that act to reassert Guerin’s voice in proceedings. Untrained was restricted to a clinical essence of form, a physical call-and-response, where the authorial voice of Guerin was evident only in the structure (a list of provocations) rather than in the content, which wholly derived from the performers.
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Conversation Piece places three professional dancers beside three professional actors in an investigation of performativity, language and modes of communication. Untrained placed two professional dancers beside two complete dance novices in an investigation of performativity, purity and, of course, training. HER LATEST WORK, CONVERSATION PIECE, CAN BE READ AS AN EVOLUTION AND EXTRAPOLATION ON THIS EARLIER WORK. Byron Perry, Stephanie Lake, Alisdair Macindoe, Conversation Piece, Lucy Guerin IncįOUR YEARS AGO, AT DANCE MASSIVE 2009, THE MEAT MARKET IN NORTH MELBOURNE PLAYED HOST TO THE PREMIERE OF LUCY GUERIN’S UNTRAINED.