HUMAN INTEREST STORY
HUMAN INTEREST STORY, Lucy Guerin Inc. and Malthouse Melbourne Production in Association with Perth International Arts Festival at Upstairs Belvoir St, 31 August-18 September 2011. Photos: Heidrun Lohr.
Discipline and chaos, tumult and order; beautiful and grotesque, bewitching and mutilated – all these elements of the everyday are present, often simultaneously, in Lucy Guerin’s theatre-dance work Human Interest Story. There’s no scriptwriting credit in the program, which suggests the expansive text is group-created; and that’s remarkable because it’s taut and well thought out; sharply apposite and witty. Initially it’s delivered as a chorus with great skill by five of the company to the other member of the cast, Stephanie Lake as she casually responds in loosely languid movements that suggest her thoughts and answers are as much part of her body as her brain.
Human Interest Story was first seen in Melbourne in 2010, then at this year’s Perth Festival, which means significant change for each season to at least this one major sequence – a commentary and Q&A on an international matter of moment. (In Perth it was the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, in Sydney it’s the Libyan revolution.) That’s pretty remarkable too: not easy to accomplish in the writing and even harder to pull off in performance; the result is an underlining of the company’s work as being quite unlike any other currently working in Australia.
Guerin has said she is preoccupied by the technology that now gives 24/7 saturation “news” coverage. Not just radio but streaming live into your iPod or iPhone; not merely TV but instant global imagery via cable and satellite; not only the professional news-gatherers but also the fragmentary instant information of Twitter and Facebook. As the dancers – Alisdair Macindoe, Talitha Maslin, Harriet Ritchie, James Shannon and Jessica Wong are bombarded by the snapping, crackling, overlapping, scarcely musical soundtrack of modern life (composer and sound designer Jethro Woodward) their bodies react and “speak” with occasional fluidity but more often than not, with the twitching, robotic actions that seem logical in an increasingly dehumanized age.
Information assails the fragile, often apparently lonely, performers (Harriet Ritchie solo, for instance, is mesmerizing). They behave towards one another in alien, disinterested ways – a body is manipulated, manouevred, folded and unfolded, poked, prodded and moved this way and that by a dancer who, all the while, carries on a disembodied duologue with a companion who is carrying out the same detached treatment on another dancer. It’s the antithesis of what we have come to expect of a dance, operatic or theatrical quartet, where response and interaction are about emotion and contact rather than distance and disinterest. It’s fascinating and unnerving to watch and listen to.
The 70-minute piece opens in a black void (Gideon Obarzanek) that’s occasionally sliced up or illuminated by Benjamin Cisterne’s clinical white lighting; the only decoration on the stage is six opened spreads of broadsheet newspaper. They are ignored (except by curious audience members, perhaps) until late in the show when they are suddenly the centre-piece of a sardonic ritual that ends with Alisdair MacIndoe being turned into a grotesque approximation of a creature such as the Elephant Man: is this what we think of the media, or is it what the media thinks of or does to us? You decide.
SBS star newsreader Anton Enus makes a disembodied but telling appearance via a huge plasma in a news broadcast of great seriousness and nonsense. We laugh but it’s a disconcerting sound and a disconcerting sequence. Lucy Guerin and her company have poked and prodded at contemporary society for some years now; they also do uncomfortable, unexpected and hilarious things to theatrical and dance traditions and norms and that’s why I strongly recommend you see Human Interest Story
