In Pieces

Piece by piece, spanning two decades, Lucy Guerin Inc’s “Pieces” continues to grow. An invitation extended to a selection of choreographers to give shape to adventurous ideas and create a new choreographic work within a supportive framework has expanded from a five- to ten-minute work presented in the Lucy Guerin Inc studios to a twenty-minute piece on the University of Melbourne Art and Culture (UMAC) stage. Jo Lloyd was amongst the first five choreographers invited to create works for “Pieces for Small Spaces” in 2005, and it seems only fitting for Lloyd to return now to the larger stage with her work “Post hoc” for “Pieces” 2025.

Performance

Lucy Guerin Inc presents “Pieces:” Jo LLoyd's “Post hoc” / Siobhan McKenna's “Hush” / Jenni Large's “Lip”

Place

University of Melbourne Art and Culture, Melbourne, Australia, November 2025

Words

Gracia Haby

Flynn Dakis and Jesper Harrison in Jo LLoyd's “Post hoc.” Photograph by Georgia Haupt

Making for an arresting visual, a scissor lift, with its limbs gently extended, stands in repose towards the back of the stage. Against the back cloth, the criss-crossed limbs are highlighted: smooth, vertical access ahead. And yet, it remains, a machine waiting to be operated. Perhaps this is not ‘before’ but rather ‘after’ as the title “Post hoc” indicates. Plucked from the Latin phrase which translates to ‘after this, therefore because of this’ and refers to the idea that that which proceeds is not necessarily linked, the scissor lift dangles as puzzle: will it be operated, has it been operated, is it related, and does it matter if I can answer any of these questions?

Flynn Dakis and Jesper Harrison move like the extended limbs of the stationary scissor lift—without the other, nothing is possible. Dakis is the left leg to Harrison’s right leg, the left arm to Harrison’s right. In costumes designed by Andrew Treloar, they are also a mirror image of each other. With one short sock on their left and right legs respectively, and one long sock on their other legs, they stitch together to make a whole. Their briefs, too, leave one chilly (presumably, I project) left or right cheek exposed. This playful lopsidedness runs counter to their precision. Two Victorian College of the Arts graduates, their movements are finely honed. Together they make and move as a machine. A machine of criss-crossed limbs, but this human machine moves, where the scissor lift does not. Facing each other, with one arm repeatedly swinging and connecting with the small of each other’s back, the contrast is as pronounced as it is mesmeric.

Dakis and Harrison also present as a fatigable machine, one that tires through exertion, as typified by their conjoined, knee-scraping slide across the front of the stage. The hydraulic fluid within their joints has expired, and their limbs have become as heavy as operating cylinders. A spotlight from the scissor lift blinks at them and in doing so illuminates their slow procession. Have they ignored the operational guidelines.

Elsewhere, Lloyd has Dakis and Harrison explore a causal relationship through movement. Although perhaps the real fallacy of assigning a causal effect to coincidence of timing or placement is my own. Have I been led astray by the scissor lift and seen machine-like movements in Dakis and Harrison? Logical fallacy committed, even when signposted, I have ignored the operation guidelines and linked machine with dancers. As Lloyd describes, when talking about extremes and looking at either end of the scale, clarity emerges “when you look at what is not there.”[1]

Zoë Brown-Holten, Coulson, Georgia Rudd, and Siobhan McKenna in “Hush” by Mckenna. Photograph by Gregory Lorenzutti

In Siobhan McKenna’s “Hush,” the human respiratory system is the machine, beginning with a sharp, audible, exaggerated intake of breath. Rachel Coulson, centre stage, gasps, and in the surrounding hush, that which was contained is loose within the theatre. In the ensuing silence, my digestive system rumbles. In the silence, someone behind me continues to battle with a plastic food wrapper. The sounds that reside within the body, both on stage, and, it transpires, off stage, are to be brought to the fore. With breath as the timekeeper, Zoë Brown-Holten, Coulson, Georgia Rudd, and McKenna, too, examine and repeat a series of universal utterances, from the sound you make when you stub your toe to the hands that reach to your throat and in doing so allow you to feel the vibrations of sound purring beneath your skin as you vocalise. Movements are at the service of making sound visible, and are layered in accordance with the percussive track which amplifies those sounds heard within. Mc Kenna spins “something that was usually quiet, quite loud,”[2] and together with composition and sound designers Helen Svoboda and Tilman Robinson invites the human voice to be a fifth dancer on the stage. In doing so, I am reminded of Meredith Monk describing the voice as being a “language of the heart that expresses the energy for which we don’t have words.”[3]

Jenni Large and Anna Whitaker in Large's “Lip.” Photograph by Gregory Lorenzutti

Energy for which we do not have the words is echoed in Jenni Large’s whip-cracking, latex-encased work, “Lip,” performed by Large and composer Anna Whitaker. Only this time the energy investigated is that of “female eroticism [as] a tangible power worth harnessing.”[4] From Large’s entry on the stage, thrashing like a rolling hexagon, dressed head to toe in red, replete with a long whip of hair lashing from a knotted, high ponytail, she is self-reliant, and refuses to be harnessed by others. Equally, when she removes almost all of her costume, head covering included, she remains self-reliant and in complete control. Standing at the foot of the stage, overhead she holds a sound device which omits a series of incessant, loud thwacks upon her application of pressure. Shifting the viewpoint of cinematic portrayals of femme fatales such as Glenn Close in the film Fatal Attraction, this rewriting of the script is perhaps closer to the original (test audiences requested Close’s character Alex’s punishment be greater than originally intended.[5]) A message driven home with lighting design by Rachel Lee which holds Large and Whitaker in diagonal shafts of light.

Three 20-minute performances commissioned by Lucy Guerin Inc over in not a blink of the eye, but an exhalation of breath. In the bright spark that is twenty years of “Pieces,” “80 works have been created” that have sought and succeeded “through an ephemeral form, [to make] something substantial and lasting.”[6] At the opening night curtain call, Lucy Guerin addresses the audience and asks for any “Pieces” alumni[7] to stand up. A sizable portion of the audience rises to their feet and makes their way onto the stage. Twenty years pieced together this way makes for a beautiful moment and an illustrious collection.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

Jo Lloyd in interview, UMAC and Lucy Guerin Inc, https://www.instagram.com/p/DRG_T1PkVZW/, accessed November 27, 2025.
Siobhan McKenna in interview, UMAC and Lucy Guerin Inc, https://www.instagram.com/p/DRQWMeREoNI/, accessed November 27, 2025.
Meredith Monk quoted by Ellen Pearlman, ‘Sound Itself Is No Sound: A journey into process and performance with Meredith Monk’, Brooklyn Rail, April/May 2003, https://brooklynrail.org/2003/04/dance/sound-itself-is-no-sound/, accessed November 27, 2025.
Jenni Large, “Lip”, “Pieces” 2025 program, https://www.umac.melbourne/media/pages/whats-on/pieces-2025/f1bebfcda1-1764217380/pieces-2025-program.pdf, accessed November 27, 2025, 9.
Leila Latif, ‘Fatal Attraction and the endurance of the 'bunny boiler', dating culture's most toxic stereotype’, BBC, April 27, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230426-fatal-attraction-bunny-boiler-dating-toxic-stereotype, accessed November 27, 2025.
Lucy Guerin, ‘20 Years of Pieces’, “Pieces” 2025 program, 3.
‘Pieces Alumni’, “Pieces” 2025 program, 4.

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