In partnership with the Adelaide Festival, Helpmann Academy is providing a choreography masterclass with renowned Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin following her Adelaide Festival show One Single Action in an Ocean of Everything.
Participants will have the opportunity to learn sequences from One Single Action in an Ocean of Everything directly from Lucy, alongside professional dancers Amber McCartney and Geoffrey Watson.
This masterclass is free for eligible Helpmann artists from our partner institutions, who have demonstrated experience in dance
ABOUT LUCY’S COMPANY
Lucy Guerin Inc (LGI) is an Australian dance company in Melbourne, est. 2002, to create and tour new dance works. The company has been based at its own venue, WXYZ Studios in North Melbourne, since 2018. Renowned for the skill and originality of its small group of performers, LGI is dedicated to challenging and extending the art of contemporary dance, which is realised through the creation of new dance works regularly touring nationally and internationally. Over the last 22 years, LGI has evolved from a structure that enables Guerin’s choreographic projects, to an organisation that also supports the development of independent dance artists in Melbourne. Through a program of residencies, classes, workshops, presentations, and mentoring opportunities, it is responsive to the shifting ideas and contexts generated by dance and choreography in the world today.
ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
Lucy Guerin – Choreographer
Award-winning choreographer Lucy Guerin was born in Adelaide, Australia, and graduated from the Centre for Performing Arts in 1982 before dancing with Russell Dumas (Dance Exchange) and Nanette Hassall (Danceworks). Guerin moved to New York in 1989 for seven years where she danced with Tere O’Connor Dance, the Bebe Miller Company and Sara Rudner, and began to produce her first choreographic works.
In 2002 she founded Lucy Guerin Inc (LGI) in Melbourne, to support the development and creation of new works with a focus on challenging and extending the discourse and practice of dance and building a vibrant community of dance artists.
Guerin’s works have merged with film, words, music, design, and visual art in collaboration with many other artists. New productions are generated through an experimental approach to the creative process. Guerin works towards creating small societies in her productions that devise their rules from the human body’s relationship to space, rhythm, and other people. The dancers are her primary collaborators.
Guerin has been commissioned by companies including Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project (USA), Lyon Opera Ballet (France), Chunky Move (Australia), Dance Works Rotterdam (Netherlands), Skånes Dansteater (Sweden), and Rambert (UK). Her awards include the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award, a New York Dance and Performance Award (‘Bessie’) and multiple Green Room, Helpmann, and Australian Dance Awards. In 2016, Guerin received the Australia Council Award for Dance, and in 2020 the Order of Australia (AO).
Amber McCartney – Dancer, Choreographer
Amber McCartney is a Naarm/Melbourne-based dancer and choreographer. Her practice incorporates prosthetics, mask-making, film and practical special effects to create new augmented bodies, unfamiliar to both the performer and viewer. Amber has worked extensively with Chunky Move and Lucy Guerin Inc (LGI), and is a creative associate of Tasdance.
Amber received a John Truscott Artists Award for her solo Tiny Infinite Deaths, performed in RISING 2023 at the National Gallery of Victoria. This work was originally commissioned by LGI for PIECES 2022, co-presented by LGI and The Substation. In 2023, she premiered her solo Baby Girl, commissioned by Tasdance, for MONA FOMA in the Nolan Gallery, MONA.
In 2022 Amber was honoured to receive a Chloe Munro Fellowship through LGI. She also won a Green Room Award for Best Performer in Prue Lang’s Project F and was a finalist for the Telstra Emerging Choreographer Award. Her film Tiny Passenger was screened in dance(lens) at Dancehouse. In 2020, Amber was a recipient of Solitude 1, Chunky Move’s home-based residency program and created her film Softtrap for the 2021 Activators program.
Geoffrey Watson – Multi-disciplinary Artist
Geoffrey Watson is a Melbourne-based artist whose work is rooted in choreography but has branches in wearable design, text, lighting, sculpture and photography.
Through this work, Geoffrey advocates for a state of perceptual unrest: an agent to further confound the already confusing landscapes of art, history and reality.
Geoffrey’s performance works include Camel (Arts House, 2016), Loving You Ad Nauseam (Trades Hall, 2016) DISTRACTION: Smackdown! (Melbourne Fashion Festival, 2017), DISTRACTION: T.C. F’d Up (Counihan Gallery, 2017), Geoffrey’s Corpse: Violet Spurlock (Uferstudios Berlin, 2019), Rachael Wisby (The Substation, 2019), and ongoing visual arts mission Reverse Fruit.
As a performer, Geoffrey has worked with companies and artists including BalletLab, Nana Biluš-Abaffy, Lucy Guerin Inc. Lee Serle, Alisdair Macindoe, and Gekidan Kaitaisha. His costumes have been featured in Virgin Australia Fashion Festival, Melbourne Fashion Week, and in works by Lilian Steiner, Brooke Stamp, Matthew Bird et al.
PRESENTING PARTNER
