UNTRAINED

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.
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