From islands reached through repeated mantra to the forest floor by way of film, in Lucy Guerin Inc’s “I’m in a Forest,” seems, too, a natural geographical leap. Shifting states, and shifting venues, “I’m in a Forest,” Lucy Guerin Inc’s first foray into film as an artwork (as opposed to documentation and promotional material) features 21 dancers as my guide, writ large on the screen at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), another venue, and medium, not necessarily associated with performing arts.

“I’m in a Forrest” first screened as part of Biennale Danza in Venice, 2023, as part of their dance-on-film programme. Directed by Lucy Guerin and Angus Kemp, the short film, as if on the heels of the dancers as they navigate the empty gallery space, and filmed at the conclusion of Lucy Guerin’s “Newretro” run, allows me to journey where otherwise I could not. With the camera oscillating between feeling like it is my own eyes and steering its own course as it plunges me into a knot of dancers, revealing angles typically not privy to an audience member, it in turn reveals a new way of entering and reading the work as it becomes its own entity. It summons the forest floor of the title, from the concrete floor of the gallery. The title of which plucked from dancer Michelle Heaven’s revelation that one of the things she conjured a sense of, whilst performing, was a forest. Compressing 21 works created throughout 21 years into a 17-minute director’s cut, the camera travels around the dancers, with a choreographic eye. Without the audience, and in such proximity, a new, reactive intimacy reveals itself. Laced over the dance, four dancers, Heaven included, speak about what they think about while on stage. This layering of internal, personal thoughts adds to the biodiversity, the strength of the soil, the cinematic forest floor, establishing this as not a re-performance, but the transmission of ideas.

Lane’s “Pulau (Island)” and Guerin and Kemp’s “I’m in a Forrest” make the most of or respond to the specificity of their sites, yielding to time bending, destabilising journeying. Allowing a multiplicity of meanings to emerge, in celebration, rich like the earth beneath my feet. One a choreographic response to art, the other a choreographic response to dance, and both making of me, an earth-bound pollinator.