Human Interest Story

Overview

Our experience of the world and its events is a complex, often cacophonic relationship between a non-stop feed of information and what is immediately important to us in our daily lives. As choreographer Lucy Guerin acknowledges in her program notes, the common result of this relationship is that "the trivialities of daily life tend to overtake so easily the infuriating and heart-rending events which are reported to us everyday". How can we not let slip news of uprisings, bombings and invasions in distant countries when faced with the pressing dilemma of what to eat for dinner?

Guerin's work, Human Interest Story, grows out of this tension. Six performers begin in a familiar scene: staring emptily at a giant, glowing television screen that feeds them an endless gruel of information. Their response is to parrot newsreaders, robotically articulating the gestures and vocal qualities of the sanitised news anchor, reporting atrocity and controversy without marked emotional comment. As a trigger, this is a necessary scene for Guerin's audience, and it is from here that the dancers unfold into unpacking our mutable relationship with the mediated world.

As an audience, we are drawn to the lighter moments, when dancer Stephanie Lake performs a solo sequence broken up by mundane commentary about her life, her routine while on tour and her lack of definite opinion on Australian politics. In contrast, when in later sequences we see a repetition of fractured, violent events that could have been picked from footage of riots across the world, our attentions phase out. The scene has slipped away because there is no human interest for us to grip.

For Sydney viewers, it is a lovely coincidence that Human Interest Story and UK company, DV8's Can We Talk About This? have opened so close together. Both pieces bring out the tensions of our current media landscape, and do so through introducing spoken word as another form of physical, rather than linguistic, expression. Whether seen together or individually, these works are effective in drawing our focus to the specific moral dilemma of how we can balance news of the world with our own routines.

That Human Interest Story relates a mixed expression of this dilemma, rather than hammering a single view, makes it all the more effective in allowing you to prepare your own response to the chaos of the world.