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“Human Interest Story aims to synthesise the many relationships between the news and our experience.

My own relationship to current events feels complex and not without a certain amount of anxiety. The trivialities of daily life tend to overtake so easily the infuriating and heart-rending events which are reported to us everyday.

Of course, this is normal and as it should be. We cannot live our lives constantly responding emotionally, intellectually and financially to the rollercoaster of the day’s headlines.

But there is a responsibility to know what’s going on in the world. Most of us have some kind of routine for staying in touch with world events; listening to the news in the car, reading the paper, watching TV at night, which fits into and overlaps with our domestic routine.

It is this interweaving of mundane daily detail and devastating global happenings which is at the core of Human Interest Story.

Here in Australia, it often feels like a safe haven; removed from the threats of war, famine and terrorism. We have serious issues to deal with in our country but most of us don’t know what it is to live in an unstable, dangerous place where our freedoms are severely threatened by outside forces.

But it’s always a possibility: as we saw with the Black Saturday bushfires, we can be touched. We are not immune to large scale tragedy, but it feels like a distant threat.

The fortunes of our planet are transmitted to us in a constant stream of words and images that cause us to swing from anger, to empathy, to indifference, to fear, to ignorance, to helpless inertia and sometimes into action. There are days when the news is on the tip of our tongues and others when our own personal concerns consume us and we don’t give it a thought.

News events may seem an odd choice for a dance piece. They are factual and cut and dried, belonging to a world documented through words and images. Dance is often considered a less ‘pointy’ form of communication. It affects us in complex and not always easily articulated ways and cannot give us the detailed information of a news broadcast with the same efficacy.But it can synthesise a complex web of information, ideas and emotions.

The news is dazzling in its speed and detail, beaming directly to our inner sanctums and connecting us with the messy, dangerous, frightening and sad stories of our world. Its language and format are almost comforting in their familiarity, in spite of the horrors they convey.

It is these tensions that have become the physical material of Human Interest Story.”

Lucy Guerin

View a range of archival material related to this work in the LGI Digital Collection on the Theatre and Dance Platform at the University of Melbourne.