Local Gestures
because the personal is cultural
The problem with pain is that one’s is always felt, whereas that of others is merely seen. What I’m saying is: one’s most minimal pain is more felt than the most extreme suffering of others. It might be for this reason that director Brigitte Haentjens chose the second person for the title of the duet she choreographed for Anne Le Beau and Francis Ducharme: Ta douleur. Your pain… never as great as mine. It’s the kind of detachment that each performer exhibits when confronted with the other’s suffering. The same could be said for this spectator. To be fair, Ta douleur gains self-awareness in its most humorous moments. Early in the show, after feeding into the melodramatic acting that constitutes the bulk of the performance, Le Beau and Ducharme purge all the platitudes we tell each other: “C’est pas facile, hein?” For the most part however, Haentjens is interested in when the body is the object of such pain that it becomes unintelligible. The victim of an overabundance of emotion, it merely cries, trembles, convulses. It is but the physical appearance of pain, little more than a blocking of emotional states. This is only enhanced by the decision to constantly fade in and out of black. This fragmentation prevents Haentjens from finding the links that would have made Ta douleur more choreographic. It is as though, without words, the woman who is more used to directing plays did not know how to make one scene flow into the next. Despite its minimal story and movement, the pain explored here is concrete. Too concrete. It is uniform in its capitalization on pain as and from violence. This might be an effort to make it theatrical, but it only ends up undermining itself by constantly striking the same loud note. In the end, Ta douleur plays like other people’s pain: overly dramatic, blown out of proportion, easy to disregard. Ta douleur 18-22 & 25-29 September at 8pm Théâtre La Chapelle lachapelle.org 514.843.7738 Tickets: 30$ / Students: 25$
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Fight your partner to the death. If you win, they can always be replaced anyway. It’s a feeling that can come from living in a city with an endless supply of single people, or from witnessing a dance show with an unusually high number of performers: twenty-one of them in the case of Cas Public’s Duels, which includes the entire company, plus a few choice guests. Helen Blackburn and Pierre Lecours share choreographing duties for the twenty short pieces that make up the programme. Despite the possibilities that such a high number of performers and pieces offer, the numbers are often repetitive. The opening prologue sets us up for what can be expected for most of the night: a man and a woman, the latter fragile, on pointes, needing the help of the man to support her. When she loses the duel, another man picks her up from the floor, less from compassion than opportunism. It’s not the first time that Cas Public flirts with gendered violence. It was also at the core of Suites Cruelles, their last show not aimed at children. There seems to be a tension between wanting to deal with the world as it is, recognizing that sexism still exists, and wanting to transcend these confines. Unfortunately, the latter happens too rarely, though it does offer Duels its most invigorating moments. In the second duet, Blackburn herself dances with Sébastien Cossette-Masse, a younger male dancer, and it begins and ends with her lifting him and carrying him a few steps across the floor. Beyond the pleasure of seeing Blackburn, who usually sticks to the role of choreographer, onstage, there is also the satisfaction of witnessing this reversal of typical ideas surrounding age and gender. There is but one duet that involves two women (Geneviève Bolla and Daphnée Laurendeau) and one that involves two men (Lecours and Simon-Xavier Lefebvre). For better of for worse, they don’t look much different from the rest. The most subversive moments occur in straight couplings, like when Daniel Soulières and Merryn Kritzinger both lift each other off the floor independently of their gender or age difference. Or in the duet with relative newcomers, choreographer Virginie Brunelle and dancer Alexandre Carlos, where the overall violence of the show finally lets up to give us something refreshingly gentler, with little physical contact. However, the duel ends with Brunelle being carried off by another man with her legs wide open as her partner goes on to dance with another woman. Like what women can always be replaced. A couple of men do figuratively put themselves in women’s shoes as they pull off a few ballerina steps. Soulières, lifted by three other men, dances above the ground as if he were lighter than a feather. Cai Glover, in his duet with Laurendeau, has a few brief moments on the tip of his toes, as though on pointes. After all the ass slapping that women in the show have to endure, each time with the sting of female objectification, it is also a mild compensation when actress Sylvie Moreau gives the same treatment to Carlos. For the most part, Duels bathes in the themes that might be expected given the title of the show: couples, fighting, mirror images, and – though dance critics see sex whenever two dancers happen to touch one another – indeed, sex. As the motionless bodies pile up onstage, it becomes clear that, as Pat Benatar’s catchy anthem goes, love is a battlefield. Duels 12-14 & 19-21 September at 8pm / 22 September at 4pm Agora de la danse www.agoradanse.com 514.525.1500 Tickets: 32$ / Students: 24$ Benoît Lachambre’s Snakeskins: because you can only accuse Lachambre of being so hit-or-miss due to his uncompromising commitment to his artistic pursuits… and he’s due for a hit. (October 10-12, Usine C) Nicolas Cantin’s Grand singe: because nobody else manages to pack as much punch by doing so little. (October 30-November 1, Usine C) Brian Brooks’s Big City & Motor: because Brooks explores concepts that only push his choreography further into the physical world, turning the human body into little more than a machine. (November 22-25, Tangente) Karine Denault’s PLEASURE DOME: because we haven’t seen her work since 2007, when she presented the intimate Not I & Others using only half of the small Tangente space, dancing with humility, as though the line between performer and spectator simply hinged on a matter of perspective. (February 6-9, Agora de la danse) Pieter Ampe & Guilherme Garrido’s Still Standing You: because Ampe & Garrido have created one of the most compelling shows of the past few years, a dense study of masculinity and friendship covered with a thick layer of Jackass trash. (February 12-16, La Chapelle) Sharon Eyal & Gai Bachar’s Corps de Walk: because it’s the first time we get to see a work by Eyal in six years, when she blew us away with a non-stop human parade that was decidedly contemporary in its transnationalism and use of everyday movements like talking on cell phones. (February 28-March 2, Danse Danse) Mélanie Demers’s Goodbye: because, much like David Lynch did with Inland Empire, Demers demonstrated that an artist doesn’t need to instill suspension of disbelief in its audience to work, that dance can be powerful as dance just as film can be powerful as film. (March 20-22, Usine C) Maïgwenn Desbois’s Six pieds sur terre: because Desbois demonstrated that one doesn’t need to sacrifice art in order to make integrated dance. (March 21-24, Tangente) Yaëlle & Noémie Azoulay’s Haute Tension: because Yaëlle Azoulay came up with the most exclamative piece ever presented at the Biennales de Gigue Contemporaine. (March 28-30, Tangente) Dorian Nuskind-Oder’s Pale Water: because with simple means Nuskind-Oder manages to create everyday magic. (May 10-12, Tangente) |
Sylvain Verstricht
has an MA in Film Studies and works in contemporary dance. His fiction has appeared in Headlight Anthology, Cactus Heart, and Birkensnake. s.verstricht [at] gmail [dot] com Categories
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