Lucy Guerin’s Human Interest Stories

It’s chaotic, it’s interconnected fast-paced synapses of information flicking to and fro. It is current affairs and news and sometimes it needs to be interpreted in an abstract way because otherwise we are prone to stiff methodical analysis that lacks the feeling often present in the stories we see. This is why Human Interest Stories, the latest work by choreographer Lucy Guerin currently showing at the Malthouse theatre, uses dance to interpret the way that we emotionally react to global stories that are often tragic, but still presented to us through that cold clear shield of the television screen.

Human Interest Stories was an idea that partly began with the Black Saturday disaster and the notion that Victorians had prior to the event that we were immune from those large scale tragedies that seemed to only affect other countries. Then suddenly there they were, those names and faces, friends of friends, people we knew. It was a global scale disaster, but we felt it on a personal level. Finally we were the news.

It was a wakeup call for Victorians, who had become so used to the constant barrage of tweets, texts and television that we became immune to their content. This is something that Guerin has tried to capture in her choreography as well as the rhythm of disaster and contrast to the media in what has been called her “most ambitious work to date.”

Guerin’s Structure and Sadness proved a major highlight at the Malthouse in 2006 and told the story of the collapse of the Westgate Bridge. ArtsHub asked Guerin if there was something about this sort of chaotic and frantic situation that leant itself to dance? “The clash of chaos and order is something that I really enjoy working with,” she said. “I’ve been involved with very formal constructs in dance but I also love to destroy them and I think that actually technology and the media are a kind of way that these two things come together because it’s so in one sense, defined and controlled, but it’s really contrasting with this dangerous kind of messy world that it’s portraying so it gives me both aspects to work with in dance.”

Guerin told ArtsHub that she hasn’t intended for the work to be a critique of the media, “It’s not political in any way, I guess it’s just more what sort of skills do we need or how do we manage this amount of information and the emotional impact that they have.”

“I think increasingly I’ve wanted my dance works to connect with, for want of a better word, the real world. I don’t use dance in a mimetic way. I don’t think that dance can think about these events in a way that say a film, or a book or language can, it’s not kind of an art form that can communicate factual details very well.”

But how can you tell a story through dance without simply re-enacting it? With this work, Guerin has used spoken word and media to flip our perspective about what is newsworthy and hopefully will enable us to question the way that we react to the news. She says, “I think that I’m still looking for a way to connect with daily experiences of people and I think that what that can offer is this much more complex multilayered experience that works on a number of levels, visual and intellectual and emotional and sort of synthesizes into a more whole experience for a viewer.”

Guerin had the dancers write journals every day for half an hour detailing their mundane experiences for the day. Boring details like what they had for dinner, what they did with friends, highly personal and specific events and hardly newsworthy. As a way of turning contexts inside out they had Anton Enus from SBS World News read out some of the journals, turning stories we would never hear into media and shaping it into a news context – the famous voice of Enus will certainly help with the impact of what is an innovative way of looking at the media.

Becoming lost within your own personal stories, like the ones that Enus reads, is something that happens to all of us. Nevertheless, Keeping abreast of current affairs can be a difficult thing to maintain, and Guerin admits that there is a certain amount of guilt that is associated with not knowing what is going on, “I do find it hard to find the time to do that but also I just get involved in various projects of my own, or my work, or family life and I can neglect what’s going on and I think this causes a certain amount of anxiety if I feel that I’m losing touch with what’s happening.“

In a way this work aims to capture some of that anxiety, the not knowing, the coming absorption in our own personal narrative, but also the flippant disregard we have when consuming news, a disregard not borne out of cold hearts but borne out of necessity. One cannot form these emotional attachments to the plight of every human in the world, but one is constantly aware of it.

Especially in these times of “twitterverse” and where 24 hours is a millennia in terms of how fast news stories can change and evolve, a dance piece is an interesting way of exploring our reactions on an poignant and abstract level, allowing bodies to express our flicking, whirring and constantly moving minds.

And finally Guerin says that she hopes that, “People will recognise themselves and their experience in relation to receiving news and current events and I always hope in my works that people will have some formal realisation about themselves and their lives and I think that’s quite a big ask but that’s what I’m aiming for.”