Split is the second show for La Biennale by the Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin, trained in New York and working since the second half of the 1980s, who comes to Venice with the eponymous company she founded in Melbourne in 2002.
Split oscillates between two bodies on a bare stage, where the space progressively diminishes and time contracts, leading them sometimes to conflict and competition, at others to fusion and harmony. On this square, the ring of life, a pair of dancers, one dressed in blue and one with the natural and essential nudity of her body. Lucy Guerin brings dance down to its fundamentals – time, space, movement – and challenges the perception of the female body. “Having one naked and the other clothed created a split in identity that intensified the piece. For me it gives seriousness and normality to the female body, which is such a site of commodification, exploitation, shame and shock. It saddens me to think of the ways women are constantly forced to conform to a ridiculous ideal. In Split it is what the body does as much as what it is that is important”. A singular duet for women alone to the music of Robin Rimbaud, alias Scanner, Split was created at a time in which the choreographer felt the need to be essential, to feel “that luxury of closeness with the dancers, to play and search in a low-pressure environment”.
