UNTRAINED

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Untrained Four men perform this work. Two of them are highly skilled, experienced dancers and two have no movement training whatsoever. Untrained questions our ideas about what is worth watching in a performance. The complex, refined movements one can do with ease, another can only try and approximate. All performers are given the same instructions. How they execute them constructs an individual portrait of each man and also an unavoidable comparison between them. This evolution of information, built up through units of action, points out what they have in common and where their physical histories set them apart. Not your average contemporary dance performance, Untrained is described by its director, choreographer Lucy Guerin, as a “theatrical exploration”. The work began as a workshop exploring Lucy’s interest in choreographing for non-dancers. What emerged is a rare and funny insider’s view into dance as an art form – which, at the same time, demonstrates how our everyday moves expose who and what we are. Lucy Guerin Inc. Lucy Guerin Inc. is a Melbourne-based contemporary dance company established in 2002 to create and tour new dance works. Renowned for the skill and originality of its small group of performers, it is a flexible organisation dedicated to challenging and extending the art of contemporary dance. The company is committed to the exploration of everyday events and the redefinition of the formal concerns of dance. New productions are generated through an experimental approach to creative process and may involve voice, video, sound, text and industrial design as well as Guerin’s lucid physical structures. Crucially, this is always a choreographic exploration, striving for visual, emotional and physical revelations that could not be generated or communicated in any other artform than dance. Lucy Guerin Inc. has been a major influence on the growing identity of Australian dance which stems from the company’s programmatic research into choreographic practice supported through several initiatives. 2
Director’s Notes Lucy Guerin Untrained is a collaborative work devised by two trained dancers, two performers with no dance training and myself. Initially in Untrained, I was interested in how non-dancers dealt with choreographed dance steps. It brought up the question of what we most respond to in a performance. Is it people doing remarkable things that as an audience member we could never achieve, or our ordinary selves reflected back at us in a new context? Untrained is not a dance in the traditional choreographed sense where dancers learn set movements and do the same thing every time they perform it. Each performer responds to a list of written instructions and depending on whether they have had a dance background or not, and on their physical histories their responses to the instructions are different, essentially revealing their physical natures and to a degree their personalities and the way they approach their lives. Over the course of making the work we all contributed to the pool of instructions, many of which showed not only the differences in how the men danced, but in how they did many other things in which none of them were trained. For the dancers, it seemed that their thinking and the way they tackled almost everything was explored through the connection they had with their bodies and how it had been trained. For the non-dancers, it was a leap into the unknown requiring courage and a sense of humour, with no experience to draw on to achieve the tasks. We feel admiration for the dancers and non-dancers alike, for different reasons. But whether they could dance or not, what clearly emerges is a portrait of each man, arrived at through an examination of their physical selves. Special thanks to Byron Perry, Antony Hamilton, Ross Coulter and Simon Obarzanek, the original cast of Untrained. 3
Page 1: LUCY GUERIN INC. UNTRAINED Directed
Page 5 and 6: Classroom Management Suggestions Da
Page 7 and 8: Introduction to Performance Topic/T
Page 9 and 10: Performance Reflection & Humour Top
Page 11 and 12: 7. Students are to consider the wor
Page 13 and 14: Physical Tableaux Series (NB studen
Page 15 and 16: Collective Discussion 9. A ‘Drawn
Page 17 and 18: Amateurs take the spotlight, steal
Page 19 and 20: What emerged from this series of ta
Page 21 and 22: Indeed, there were more than a few
Page 23 and 24: of a playground ball court or a box
Page 25 and 26: other and us. We have guessed at an
Page 27: Spring Dance festival looks to have

UNTRAINED

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