Structure & Sadness/Lucy Guerin Inc
Choreographer Lucy Guerin's company comes to Sydney (from Melbourne) laden with plaudits and an international reputation for past works. This work, Structure & Sadness, was also well received on its premiere outing at last year's Melbourne Festival (see foot of this page for other opinion). And at it's first night in the Opera House's Drama Theatre it was greeted with enthusiastic applause from a large section of the audience.
Others in the audience, including me, were puzzled by the rapturous whooping and pleased only that the festival's About an Hour series lives up to its implied promise: it's only an hour.
Structure & Sadness is inspired by the collapse during construction of a huge span of Melbourne's West Gate Bridge in October 1970. The six dancers, Fiona Cameron, Antony Hamilton, Lina Limosani, Alisdair Macindoe, Kirstie McCracken and Byron Perry (also credited as co-choreographers with their director) perform discrete and disparate sequences around two main pieces of "business": the building of a house of cards that snakes across and around the stage; and the construction and deconstruction of a bridge in neon lights.
These elements, particularly the painstaking propping of card upon card upon card, dominate the humans both in terms of interest and fascination: will the cards do their stuff? Will anyone make a mistake? How much further will the construction go before something goes wrong? If it falls, will they start the damn thing all over again?
Towards the end of the piece, five dancers work in the darkened foreground while a backlit compadre on a perilous stepladder takes full audience focus as he does things with the neon tubes. These occupy the back wall and represent a stylised bridge - or chaos, depending what he's doing. It's a strange way to treat dancers who speak to us in - according to the bumph available - a "unique movement vocabulary".
In the main, the hapless dancers flail with some futility on the periphery, almost ignored in the face of much weirdly absorbing activity. This could be seen as a metaphor for human endeavour in the face of implacable industrial might, however it could also be seen as an uneven series of ideas which are never fully explored and never fulfil their potential. For instance, Crimson and Clover (the Joan Jett version, I think) gets an amusing workout, two dancers duet briefly with long sticks, two others explore the possibilities of being joined by a length of elastic material - and so on.
[page]Yet the drama and tragedy of what ensued when 2000 tonnes of steel and concrete fell into the muddy Yarra banks, killing 35 workers and injuring many others, remains largely unexplored. It is said the dance is an investigation of the emotions, memories and resonances left by the disaster, but these ambitions remain underdeveloped in this frustrating work, except in the music/soundscape by Scottish composer Gerald Mair. He creates an eerie evocation of the various states of metal - groaning, screeching, creaking, humming, pinging - in chillingly effective ways.
It's perhaps unfortunate (or a blessing, depending who's watching) that the Guerin company is in Sydney at the same time as Israel's Batsheva and the pairing of Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The visitors demonstrate in their every move the outcome of total dedication to realising to their fullest extent craft and ideas - and how this is only possible, particularly in dance, when the financial resources (which translates as time to develop, refine, rehearse and develop, refine and rehearse) are available.
Can't help thinking of Pina Bausch in provincial Wuppertal, beavering away at the development process for months before even stepping into the rehearsal studio, while Structure and Sadness is neither structured nor sad - in the apparent absence of that kind of rigour.
And rigour - physical and mental - is what a work whose wellspring is the topic of real deaths and real calamity demands. Rigour from funding bodies and the audience would also be helpful: a whooping claque has never been known to encourage artists to examine their practice and try harder. If our responses are flabby, unthought out and foolish, guess what?
For me, the whole was very much less than the sum of its parts. It was undisciplined and under-developed in thought and resolution. This is particularly disappointing as the work received support from the federal government scheme set up to assist major festival projects. Unfortunately it's administered through the Australia Council which is supposed to deliver arms' length probity, but which often translates into a hands-off, asleep-at-the-wheel attitude. A great pity, but in this instance: mercifully short.
Structure & Sadness, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera house to January 12; www.sydneyfestival.org.au
