LGI/

“Motion Picture started out for me as a transference of form; from film to dance.

Rather than translate the film into a kind of danced story, I wanted to see what sort of dance would emerge using the different elements of film more like a musical score. It was an exhaustive research.

We danced the images, the sound, the focus, the shapes, the characters, the emotions, the mood, the edits, the camera angles, the narrative, the dialogue and many more aspects of this film. There is a great contribution from the dancers in this work.

In choosing the film, I felt that it needed to be familiar to the audience in its style and genre. As it was projected behind them, I thought it was important to have a sense of the world from which it came.

D.O.A was directed by Rudolph Maté, and is a classic of the Film Noir genre.

It was a small independently produced film that has since been chosen for the United States National Film Registry. It traverses a range of locations and employs some of the tropes of Film Noir including POV camera, back projection, dark shadowy cinematography, post- war loss of traditional values and the lead character as a victim of circumstance.

What has emerged for me through this project is a tension between the power of film and the immediacy of live performance.

We all know how seductive any screen image is. Having grown up with television as my friend and comforter, I have always been attuned to the pull of the ‘moving picture’; its zone out and zoom in allure. It sometimes feels like we are all morphing into another species, with our small and huge screens, constantly gazing at lit portals into another reality. I am fine with this. I think that change is survival.

But as a dance artist I do feel that ‘real life’ and physical activity and interaction have essential experiences to offer, so this play between screen engagement and real human situations is the navigation of our daily lives.

Motion Picture begins with a complete dependence by the dancers on the screen. Their eyes are glued to it and they take their timing, cues and movements from it.

As the piece evolves, they drift away from this quite literal re-enactment and as the ‘luminous toxin’ takes hold of Frank Bigelow, the stage grows more autonomous; revealing space, rhythm, visceral sensation and by the end it has severed from the film altogether into its own fraught drama somehow born from this process.

At the core of Motion Picture is light. The light and shadow that Film Noir uses with such compelling affect, the luminous toxin that is Frank Bigelow’s death sentence and the light that makes film possible.

It has been a fascinating project to work on and I really look forward to having an audience to complete this loop of watching.”

Lucy Guerin (2015)

Winner of the 2016 Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography - Lucy Guerin for Motion Picture

DOA Film Credits

Director: Rudolph Maté
Producer: Leo C. Popkin
Actors: Edmond O’Brien, Pamela Britton, Luther Adler, Beverly Garland
Composer: Dimitri Tiomkin
Cinematographer: Ernest Laszlo
Distributor: United Artists

Release date: April 30, 1950

Watch the Motion Picture trailer

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.