Choreographies of Collapse: Located and Unlocated Catastrophe in Works by Lucy Guerin, Garry Stewart and Meryl Tankard

Abstract

Australian dancers are often claimed to move confidently and expansively or to ‘eat space’; however, a number of works by Australian choreographers are imbued with an anxious spatiality that belies this claim. In this paper, I examine three white settler choreographies that depict various kinds of spatial or environmental collapse: Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness (2006), Meryl Tankard’s Inuk/Inuk 2 (1997/2008), and Garry Stewart’s South (2019). All three works encode catastrophe: Structure and Sadness memorializes the Westgate Bridge disaster in Melbourne in 1970; Tankard’s Inuk and the revised Inuk 2 are concerned with climate change and social breakdown; and Stewart’s South allegorizes the disastrous Mawson expedition to Antarctica in 2012-13 as a foreshadowing of contemporary environmental collapse.  I read these works as manifestations of a specifically Australian settler anxiety that is predicated on a sense of our precariousness on this continent, both environmentally and ethically. I trace this anxiety back to what is widely regarded as the first fully Australian ballet, Eduard Borovansky’s Terra Australis (1946), which enacts the genocidal ideology of ‘smoothing the pillow of the dying race’ underpinning the Aboriginal Protection Acts, as well as Ross Gibson’s notion of the Australian Badlands as places haunted by the dispossession and massacre of First Nations peoples. In light of Rachel Swain’s call for settler choreographies to engage with an ethics of relationship to place, I analyse the role of ‘locatedness’ in these works. Whereas Guerin and Stewart’s choreographies are geographically and temporally located, Tankard’s is emphatically placeless. However, I argue that such ‘placelessness’ is a political statement that encodes the catastrophic consequences of severance from place.