LGI/

“Untrained has had several incarnations now in different contexts and with different casts. It has been shown at a number of major Australian festivals and has been presented in Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Davis (CA), Athens, Dublin, Cork, Glasgow and London. In 2011, we toured it to seventeen regional and country areas in Australia, picking up different untrained men in towns along the way.

The untrained performers for the premiere season in 2008 were two men that I knew: my brother-in-law, Simon Obarzanek, and his friend, Ross Coulter – both visual artists from Melbourne. Since then I have mostly found the untrained through an audition process.

When holding these auditions, initially I found it quite difficult to articulate what I was looking for. Someone who can move well? Someone who is uncoordinated and interesting? A regular bloke?

Yet it is very clear when I see it. It’s the same thing I look for in trained dancers I think. Someone who is able to give us a glimpse into their personal world without too much artifice or reserve. Someone who can ‘be themselves’ on stage.

When we auditioned for this latest cast, we were inundated with applicants. This necessity to update the cast regularly stems from the fact that one of the things Untrained is about is how dance training affects one’s approach to performing.

The performers respond to a list of written instructions and it is surprising how quickly the untrained men adapt to being on stage. They don’t necessarily become good dancers, but they begin to learn the timing and finesse of the trained performer.

It is joyful and refreshing to work with people who have no experience of theatre. One man asked me if he could just run down the street and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken 20 minutes before curtain up because he was a bit hungry. Another got terribly sunburnt and had a few beers before the show, things a seasoned performer would (mostly) never do. They wear their costumes home and answer their mobile phones during rehearsal. But pretty soon they lose their credibility as ‘untrained’ and sadly we must say goodbye.

Initially in Untrained, I was interested in how non-dancers dealt with choreographed dance steps. It brought up the question of what we most respond to in a performance. Is it dancers doing remarkable, virtuosic things that we as audience members could never achieve; or the visible efforts and real attempts by people like ourselves, who try something to the best of their ability? Is it admiration or empathy that delights us?

Over the course of remounting the work with the new cast, which takes one week, all the performers contribute to the pool of instructions that make up the work, so that the skills and interests of each individual are represented. Many of these show not only the differences in how the men dance, but in how they do many other things in which none of them are trained.

For the dancers, it seems that their thinking and the way they tackle almost everything is explored through the connection they have with their bodies and how it has been trained. For the non-dancers, its a leap into the unknown requiring courage and a sense of humour, with no experience to draw on to achieve the tasks.

We feel admiration for the dancers and non-dancers alike, for different reasons. But whether they can dance or not, what clearly emerges is a portrait of each man, arrived at through an examination of their physical selves.”

Lucy Guerin (2011)

Watch the Untrained 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.