Three choreographers, three pieces, three Canadian cities.

Pale Water (Première Partie), Dorian Nuskind-Oder (Montréal)

At first, but a backlit silhouette against a white screen.

Then, neon strips are positioned on six sides around Nuskind-Oder, with gaps in between, so that the eye can read a hexagon, an octagon, a dodecagon, or a simple triangle depending on the lines that are lit or extrapolated.

Many dance shows have live musicians onstage. Pale Water does something cheekier: it is as lighting designer that Simon Grenier-Poirier is onstage.

Nuskind-Oder’s movement is quiet, slow, deliberate. Her body is controlled until it appears to be in suspension.

I don’t want it to be over.

Falling Off the Page, Jacinthe Armstrong (Halifax)

Falling Off the Page begins with one dancer’s hand seemingly controlling the other dancer’s foot, like a puppeteer and her dummy. This is the first in a long series of clichés:
-They wash their hair in pots filled with water in a purifying ritual.
-They travel along a road made of light (after first appearing in a square prison of light).
-They unroll a paper carpet along the lit road.
-They dip their hair in paint and drag it across the paper.
-They look back at the road travelled.

One redemptive quality: it is not uncommon for dancers here to jump in the air and let themselves fall heavily back on the ground; in Armstrong’s choreography, the dancers instead jump into the air and let their limbs float up so that for a second they almost seem to fly.

La petite mort, Maryse Damecour (Québec)

Original movement emerges when a physical constraint is added to an otherwise common gesture, like when Brice Noeser walks on all fours, but with his hands covering his face so that it is his elbows that are dragging him across the floor. It is always refreshing when a choreographer is preoccupied by something other than beauty, when the dance is allowed to be delightfully awkward, and not without humour. La petite mort revels in abrupt transitions and, when it pretends to be joyful, it’s laughable because it rings false.

It is always a treat to watch Noeser, who has such a distinct corporality, move.

www.tangente.qc.ca
www.delicatebeast.com
http://damequidanse.com/

“I bring you somewhere.”

If you’re going to follow her, truly follow her, you need to trust her.

Choreographers Chiara Frigo (Italy) and Emmanuel Jouthe (Québec) might hold hands with fingers interlaced, but it’s the only codified gesture you will find in When We Were Old. It is their starting point, a sign of trust and desire for true connection, from which anything can happen. Their relationship and the movements that stem from it are not predetermined. They are not playing roles. Their meeting is perpetual, occurs in each moment, like when they let go of each other, evolve independently, find each other again, and everything is to be done again. As a result, their meeting feels sincere.

It also allows the performers to bypass all kinds of contemporary dance clichés that often emerge as soon as a woman and a man are onstage. Their duet is neither coupley, nor antagonistic. It just feels honest. It is no coincidence that, after the show, my date told me, “I liked that she was never weak.”

Jouthe and Frigo are trying to build something together and, like the tree trunks they use as building blocks for her to stand on, the structure might end up making things shakier than no structure at all. And that’s okay. That’s the risk one takes in building a relationship or a dance.

Even the Marley that covers the floor is loose, not taped down, and can be unrolled or rolled up, allowing change and surprise. Beneath, a new floor might be revealed, or even a new costume. It is as malleable as their relationship.

Her movement is more spastic; his, more fluid and smooth. As they hover from side to side in opposite directions, they only ever meet for a brief moment in the middle. And that’s enough. By the end, it might even allow them to transform into dinosaurs among mountains made of chairs. It all depends on whether you trust them enough to bring you there.

April 24-26 at 8pm
Agora de la danse
www.agoradanse.com / www.tangente.qc.ca
514.525.1500
Tickets: 28$ / Students or under 30: 20$

“I fear embodying the absence ethnic war has left around me.”

A legitimate fear if there is one. While only Zohar Melinek can speak of the emotional toil that the performance of Collective Individual takes on him, we can say that, though he is not a trained dancer, his performance is visibly felt and therefore honest; qualities that more than compensate for any lack of technical training.

He benefits from the help of his partner from their collective Thirst/Clarity, dancer Mary St-Amand Williamson. She too seems to be more concerned with sincerity of purpose and emotion than with physical virtuosity. All the better for the subject at hand, the recent revolutions in the Arab world.

The strength of the choreography is not in the symbolism of its gestures, but in the constraints they impose on the body and which differentiate it from so many others. The floor work stands heads and shoulder above the rest, like when they slowly move with their feet and head weighing them down against the floor, but their ass high in the air, triangular shapes that make their movement difficult.

On the other hand, it is at its weakest when the symbolism is obvious (and therefore I must admit on the cheap side), like when Williamson is seemingly locked between four walls made of light. The physical constraints cease to be embodied and temporarily turn the performance into little more than bad miming.

While a minimal amount of synchronicity is necessary for any social movement to effect change, here the choreography would be richer if the performers had less recourse to it. The movement is simple (delightfully so) and the eye would have benefited from constantly shifting between this simplicity and the density of juxtaposition.

Video images of the uprising only make two brief appearances, but each time the live performers get swallowed by the mass of protesters. One can only imagine how powerful Collective Individual would be if it could represent live the energy of a sea of people and the wave they inevitably embody.

The show ends with its most compelling sequence, Melinek and Williamson noisily moving while being lit by nothing but the projector projecting nothing. It confirmed my sneaking suspicion: the whole show could have taken place in that darkness.

The world premiere of Collective Individual was, like any good revolution, imperfect, but promising.

April 5 & 6 at 8pm
MAI
www.m-a-i.qc.ca
www.zoharmelinek.com
vimeo.com/user4058531
514.982.3386
Tickets: 22$ / Students: 15$

The beam of light from a projector appears in front of the viewer instead of just behind. The screen becomes a mirror, reminding the viewer: this is not reality; it’s just a movie. The projector lights up the title, Inland Empire, by David Lynch.

At the beginning of Mélanie Demers’s Goodbye, dancer Jacques Poulin-Denis opens with a typical Demers move, a series of statements paradoxical in their juxtaposition: “This is not the show,” he tells us. “Not a flat screen, not reality.” The question that always emerges with Demers is: then what is it? One should never readily believe what the performers are saying. Of course, when Poulin-Denis is claiming, “This is not the show,” he is reminding us of the opposite: this is a show. But does it even matter one way or another?

Extreme close-up of a needle on a vinyl record. To say that it’s just music is to undermine the kind of emotional manipulation that art is involved in.

Even the electric guitar riffs in Goodbye are reminiscent of Lynch, most particularly Angelo Badalamenti’s score for the Twin Peaks series. That’s not to mention the floor, a black-and-white checkerboard of inhuman proportions that dramatizes the space and makes the dancers look trivial, like mere chess pieces. The Black Lodge.

A woman watches television, though on it there is nothing but static. Soon, however, the TV image gives way to animated rabbits in their apartment. It could all be in her head. Se faire son cinéma.

Do we need to believe that Brianna Lombardo and Poulin-Denis are really a couple to be affected by their dance? Of course not. The moment they interact, the moment they touch, the moment they move together, they enter into a relationship, their actions have consequences.

We don’t need to believe that Grace Zabriskie is not Grace Zabriskie. She just needs to walk in, creepy as fuck. If you don’t feel anything, it’s because you’re taking Zabriskie for granted; as real. Suspension of disbelief is a myth. The true power of cinema lies in complete and utter disbelief.

Demers is not even trying to pretend. When a performer needs to have tears running down their face, they use eye drops. The microphones they hold are fake, aluminum paper balls on black sticks; the knife, an aluminum paper blade. No one will get hurt. At least not because of objects. No matter how much I hate metaphors, I must recognize that most blades are metaphorical. Artistic ones, always.

When Laura Dern gets fake stabbed, she runs down Hollywood Boulevard before falling in front of one of the stars from the Walk of Fame. Lynch will not allow you to believe any of it is real. It doesn’t matter. If you are only affected by things that are real, you’re not human.

When Poulin-Denis looks up at the audience while Demers is sucking on his nipple, his reaction is to say, “No, no… It’s not what you think. This is not the show.” The statement is of course hilariously ironic. Demers knows that such a strong image is bound to have an effect on the audience. Would it have any less of an effect if we were to take it in as reality? Of course not. Quite the contrary.

Whenever Dern and Justin Theroux have a scene together, we never quite know whether they are the actors they are portraying in the movie or the characters the actors are portraying in the movie in the movie. At one point, Dern screams out, “Damn! This sounds like dialogue from our script!” That’s because, of course, it is. First and foremost, and if nothing else, every movie is about people making a movie.

Another typical Demers move: when Poulin-Denis is wiping the water off the floor, he is of course doing so for the dancers’ safety; but, by virtue of being performed onstage, the action is also necessarily dramatic. An everyday gesture becomes an artistic one. “Il y a de l’éclairage, des costumes…” he says, laying out the reasons why we might be inclined to think that this is a show. As if those things didn’t exist outside of the theatre…

“Is this our set?” Dern asks. She means in the movie in the movie. However, the set only ends up getting used in the movie. Every space is one location scout away from becoming a set.

Later, when Poulin-Denis is the one sucking on Lombardo’s nipple, Chi Long shouts, “This is it! This is the show!” Yet the gesture is essentially the same as before. If anything, the gender reversal and repetition (and therefore lack of surprise) have made it more socially acceptable, less dramatic. It’s always been the show, even before Goodbye ever started.

The needle on the record, the music, the emotional manipulation... The viewer cries. She cries because she relates with the character Dern is playing. (What in The Wars Timothy Findley beautifully refers to as “shouts of recognition.”) They encounter each other and kiss in the television. Art as a meeting ground, as the space where artist and audience come into contact, where the line between the artistic and the everyday gets blurred.

Goodbye. No, really, goodbye. Poulin-Denis keeps telling the audience the show is over, in so many different ways that it becomes comical, yet the audience doesn’t leave. This is still the show. When does it really end? What are the cues? When the stage lights fade out, when the house lights come on, when the performers take a bow, when we clap, when we leave the theatre, when we finally stop thinking about the show… Some shows never end. And, even when shows do end, what awaits us outside the theatre? More metaphorical blades. Theatre.

usine-c.com
maydaydanse.ca

You might be hearing animal sounds, but human beings are already somewhere else. They are no longer a manifestation of life itself; they have taken it and placed it outside of themselves. It’s now in the nature around them, the nature that used to inhabit them, and in the heavens above.

At the beginning of choreographer Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Corps de Walk, the twelve Carte Blanche dancers lift their arms up to the sky like they’re in Alvin Ailey’s Revelations. However, while in the latter the performers couldn’t be more earnest, here something is already off. It reads like parody. By spiritualizing themselves, human beings have become more disembodied, less animal, less human.

In her previous show presented in Montreal, Bertolina, Eyal already offered us a microcosm of human society, though in this former vision each was still allowed to retain some individuality. Here, differences are eradicated until uniformity takes over both their appearance and movement. It’s at first funny, then unsettling, and eventually nightmarish.

From robots to ballet dancers, there’s only one step. They go there. By dehumanizing themselves, human beings end up parodying themselves. In Corps de Walk, uniformity and synchronicity reach obsessive heights, falling into sci-fi horror territory. Think Village of the Damned, The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and any other movie where a single entity controls multiple bodies. The resulting creatures are androgynous and beige, desexualized, deracialized. Their bodies, overly controlled, are troubling.

A dancer shouts: “Now”? Their synchronicity is regimented from the outside, dictated military-style. Obedience is necessary; and disturbing. They are a mindless herd. The togetherness does not feed them; it feeds off them. As opposed to Karine Denault’s Pleasure Dome or Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cesena, they are but empty vessels. In Denault’s show, you witnessed the ego fade away; here, it is the self itself that is eradicated. The oppression is claustrophobic.

On the rare occasions when a dancer escapes the group to execute their own movement, it is liberating; but they inevitably get swallowed back into the mass. (After the show, I heard an astute audience member compare it to Jean-Pierre Perreault’s work.)

Dance music blasts over the speakers. As the lights slowly fade, the dancers (barely) move to the beat in a tight formation. They are zombies at the club. Just do like everybody else. Don’t bring any attention to yourself. Don’t stand out. Don’t be.

February 28-March 2 at 8pm
Danse Danse / Théâtre Maisonneuve
www.dansedanse.net / laplacedesarts.com
514.842.2112 / 1.866.842.2112
Tickets: 34,85$-62,34$

Si vous mettez une perruque, vous pouvez tout faire. Si vous ajoutez des lunettes de soleil, vous pouvez dépasser toutes les limites de ce qui est considéré comme un comportement acceptable. Le déguisement sert à camoufler certains aspects de soi pour permettre à de nouveaux d’émerger. Il en est de même de l’art. L’art est un mensonge qui révèle la vérité, Picasso a dit.

Dans Pleasure Dome, la chorégraphe Karine Denault et les cinq autres interprètes (Dana Gingras, k.g. Guttman, Jonathan Parant, Alexandre St-Onge, Alexander Wilson) se cachent sous des perruques pour pouvoir aller au-delà du préconçu. Dès que l’on entre dans la salle de l’Agora de la danse, on le remarque; ce sont les trois danseuses qui se trouvent aux consoles de son, alors que les musiciens sont étendus sur le plancher. Après cette inversion des rôles, les interprètes marchent autour de la scène à quatre pattes. Certains se lèvent pour les guider pour un moment, pour ensuite retourner sur leurs quatre pattes et suivre le troupeau à nouveau. Les paramètres des rôles demeurent fluides, malléables, comme dans Cesena d’Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

En laissant libre cours à leur id, les interprètes abandonnent leur ego, phénomène rare en performance scénique, et donc rafraichissant. En début de spectacle, Denault demeure coucher sur le plancher, s’efface. On avait déjà aperçu cet aspect de la chorégraphe dans son dernier solo, Not I & Others.

Le plaisir, c’est aussi l’abandon de l’idéal – virgule – de la beauté. La beauté, si superficielle peut-elle être, pèse tout de même lourdement; le plaisir, quant à lui, est léger, comme les interprètes, qui semblent parfois flotter au-dessus de la scène, ou tout du moins au-dessus de nous, spectateurs assis directement sur le plancher.

De façon surprenante (mais qui rejoint encore Cesena), le plaisir, aussi communautaire soit-il, demeure solitaire. Les interprètes se touchent rarement, mais le besoin d’une collectivité demeure nécessaire et indéniable.

À intervalles réguliers, les interprètes retournent à un état contemplatif, comme s’il y avait toujours la possibilité d’un retour en arrière, d’un recommencement si le résultat est jugé insatisfaisant, à la manière d’un jeu vidéo. Rien ne doit être accepté comme étant définitif. Pleasure Dome aussi semble transitoire. Si on revenait la semaine prochaine, on ne serait pas surpris que ça l’ait une toute autre allure.

Subjectif subjectif subjectif : j’ai une prédisposition pour un éclairage scénique minimale. Ça dramatise l’espace, surtout quand on veut tellement voir ce qui se passe. Je crois qu’ici aussi ça aurait pu avoir des effets bénéfiques. Ça aurait accentué l’espace entre les spectateurs et les interprètes; car malgré notre proximité (assis tout autour de la salle, nous sommes tous au premier rang), nous ne faisons pas partie de cet univers de plaisir. La distance virtuelle aurait souligné l’aspect participatif du plaisir; on ne peut pas compter sur les autres pour nous le transmettre. Le pleasure dome aurait paru tel le saint graal, une destination à atteindre, si on le désire. (J’aurais voulu qu’un des interprètes me donne la main, me donne la permission d’y entrer.)

La plus grande force de Pleasure Dome est son refus du symbolique. Tout comme on ne peut parvenir au plaisir par un raccourci, le sens d’une œuvre d’art ne s’impose que s’il émerge de lui-même. C’est ici le cas.

6-8 février à 20h & 9 février à 16h
Agora de la danse
www.agoradanse.com
514.525.1500
Billets : 28$ / Réduits : 20$

Quel est notre rapport à la chose vidéographique? Avec l’omniprésence du médium, qui ouvre et clôt son nouveau spectacle, la chorégraphe Marie Béland se met les deux pieds dans la question. Une création aux trois couleurs cathodiques, en trois épisodes – peut-être le même – utilisant principalement trois médiums différents.

BLEU, ou la vidéo

D’abord jeu d’ombres – et donc nécessairement de proportions et perspectives – qui s’entremêlent ensuite avec la projection vidéo live des trois danseurs : Simon-Xavier Lefebvre, Marilyne St-Sauveur, et Ashlea Watkin. C’est plus qu’une rencontre des éléments;  C’est le réel et l’art(ificiel) qui effacent les lignes, se fondent ensemble, et s’influencent jusqu’à ce qu’on ne sache plus lequel des deux l’on regarde.

Les interprètes font dans le jeu d’acteur de Télé-Québec (même si Watkin, comme dans n’importe quel autre spectacle de danse dans lequel elle se trouve, est toujours la meilleure actrice). De façon appropriée, ils sont vêtus de couleurs primaires et secondaires (rouge, bleu, jaune, vert), comme s’ils étaient des adultes retardés dans une émission pour enfants.

Leurs corps se découpent sur fond noir, ce qui n’est pas sans rappeler certaines des premières vidéos d’art qui servaient souvent à capter des performances. Dans une galerie, le blanc est l’espace vierge; en vidéo, comme au théâtre, c’est le noir. Devant des images d’Elvis (le vrai ou un imitateur? Il y a une différence?) et d’Arnold à l’ère de Commando, leurs corps se dédoublent en formations psychédéliques, tel une vidéo de Nam June Paik qui s’extase à l’idée du global village. Bref, le genre de chose dont la seule chance de passer à la télé serait sur PBS. Ça veut être bon, mais c’est pas sexy du tout. Ce n’est pas nécessairement une mauvaise chose.

VERT, ou la marionnette

La partie la plus faible du spectacle, heureusement camouflée dans le milieu, où trois pompons aux couleurs de la pièce deviennent des marionnettes, les alter egos des interprètes. La performance dansée vient rejoindre le jeu d’acteur, comme si Béland a dicté aux interprètes, « Faites comme si vous étiez de mauvais danseurs. » Les idées demeurent intéressantes, mais leur mise en scène est moins convaincante.

ROUGE, ou le théâtre

Et l’histoire se répète, beaucoup plus verbale. Les échanges entre les interprètes glissent entre l’emphatique et les petites cruautés, et peut virer dans le non-sens à n’importe quel moment. Avec le bon accent, « Cat a va capoter! » peut devenir une phrase pseudo-italienne.

Devant les images qui déferlent (de The Bold & The Beautiful au hockey en passant par The Price Is Right), l’absurdité de l’humain dans la petitesse de ses intrigues inévitablement dramatisées parce que justement futiles se dessine. Béland conserve son sens de l’humour mais – surprise! – BLEU—VERT—ROUGE est aussi étrangement opaque, parfois aussi illisible que le texte confus vocalisé par les interprètes. C’est sûrement l’un des aspects les plus intrigants de la pièce (et dans le parcours de la chorégraphe).

Pour faire compétition à l’image télévisuelle et cinématographique, est-ce que la danse et le théâtre doivent eux aussi faire dans le chaos qui dégénère jusqu’à la folie schizophrénique? Pour retenir notre attention, est-ce que tout doit maintenant se terminer dans la violence?

23-25 janvier à 20h & 26 janvier à 16h
Agora de la danse
www.agoradanse.com
514.525.1500
Billets : 28$ / Réduits : 20$

My wish for the Montreal dance scene in 2013 is for Marie-Hélène Falcon to quit her job as artistic director of the Festival TransAmériques. I’m hoping she’ll become the director of a theatre so that the most memorable shows will be spread more evenly throughout the year instead of being all bunched up together in a few weeks at the end of spring. With that being said, here are the ten works that still resonated with me as 2012 came to an end.

1. Cesena, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker + Björn Schmelzer (Festival TransAmériques)
I’ve been thinking about utopias a lot this year. I’ve come to the conclusion that – since one man’s utopia is another’s dystopia – they can only be small in nature: one person or, if one is lucky, maybe two. With Cesena, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker showed me that it could be done with as many as nineteen people, if only for two hours, if only in a space as big as a stage. Dancers and singers all danced and sang, independently of their presupposed roles, and sacrificed the ego’s strive for perfection for something better: the beauty of being in all its humanly imperfect manifestations. They supported each other (even more spiritually than physically) when they needed to and allowed each other the space to be individuals when a soul needed to speak itself.

2. Sideways Rain, Guilherme Botelho (Festival TransAmériques)
I often speak of full commitment to one’s artistic ambitions as extrapolated from a clear and precise concept carried out to its own end. Nowhere was this more visible this year than in Botelho’s Sideways Rain, a show for which fourteen dancers (most) always moved from stage left to stage right in a never-ending loop of forward motion. More than a mere exercise, the choreography veered into the metaphorical, highlighting both the perpetual motion and ephemeral nature of human life, without forgetting the trace it inevitably leaves behind, even in that which is most inanimate. More importantly, it left an unusual trace in the body of the audience too, making it hard to even walk after the show.

3. (M)IMOSA: Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (M), Cecilia Bengolea + François Chaignaud + Trajal Harrell + Marlene Monteiro Freitas (Festival TransAmériques)
By mixing post-modern dance with queer performance, the four choreographer-dancers of (M)IMOSA offered a show that refreshingly flipped the bird to the usual conventions of the theatre. Instead of demanding silence and attention, they left all the house lights on and would even walk in the aisles during the show, looking for their accessories between or underneath audience members. Swaying between all-eyes-on-me performance and dancing without even really trying, as if they were alone in their bedroom, they showed that sometimes the best way to dramatize the space is by rejecting the sanctity of theatre altogether.

4. Goodbye, Mélanie Demers (Festival TransAmériques)
Every time I think about Demers’s Goodbye (and it’s quite often), it’s always in conjunction with David Lynch’s Inland Empire. The two have a different feel, for sure, but they also do something quite similar. In Inland Empire, at times, an actor will perform an emotional scene, and Lynch will then reveal a camera filming them, as if to say, “It’s just a movie.” Similarly, in Goodbye, dancer Jacques Poulin-Denis can very well say, “This is not the show,” it still doesn’t prevent the audience from experiencing affect. Both works show the triviality of the concept of suspension of disbelief, that art does not affect us in spite of its artificiality, but because of it.

5. The Parcel Project, Jody Hegel + Jana Jevtovic (Usine C)
One of the most satisfying days of dance I’ve had all year came as a bit of a surprise. Five young choreographers presented the result of their work after but a few weeks of residencies at Usine C. I caught three of the four works, all more invigorating than some of the excessively polished shows that some choreographers spend years on. It showed how much Montreal needs a venue for choreographers to experiment rather than just offer them a window once their work has been anesthetically packaged. The most memorable for me remains Hegel & Jevtovic’s The Parcel Project, which began with a surprisingly dynamic and humorous 20-minute lecture. The second half was an improvised dance performance, set to an arbitrarily selected pop record, which ended when the album was over, 34 minutes later. It was as if John Cage had decided to do dance instead of music. Despite its explanatory opening lecture, The Parcel Project was as hermetic as it was fascinating.

6. Spin, Rebecca Halls (Tangente)
Halls took her hoop dancing to such a degree that she exceeded the obsession of the whirling dervish that was included in the same program as her, and carried it out to its inevitable end: exhaustion.

7. Untitled Conscious Project, Andrew Tay (Usine C)
Also part of the residencies at Usine C, Tay produced some of his most mature work to date, without ever sacrificing his playfulness.

8. 1001/train/flower/night, Sarah Chase (Agora de la danse)
Always, forever, Sarah Chase, the most charming choreographer in Canada, finding the most unlikely links between performers. She manages to make her “I have to take three boats to get to the island where I live in BC” and her “my dance studio is the beach in front of my house” spirit emerge even in the middle of the city.

9. Dark Sea, Dorian Nuskind-Oder + Simon Grenier-Poirier (Wants & Needs Danse/Studio 303)
Choreographer Nuskind-Oder and her partner-in-crime Grenier-Poirier always manage to create everyday magic with simple means, orchestrating works that are as lovely as they are visually arresting.

10. Hora, Ohad Naharin (Danse Danse)
A modern décor. The legs of classical ballet and the upper body of post-modern dance, synthesized by the athletic bodies of the performers of Batsheva. These clear constraints were able to give a coherent shape to Hora, one of Naharin’s most abstract works to date.

Scrooge Moment of the Year

Kiss & Cry, Michèle Anne De Mey + Jaco Van Dormael (Usine C)
Speaking of excessively polished shows… La Presse, CIBL, Nightlife, Le Devoir, and everyone else seemingly loved Kiss & Cry. Everyone except me. To me, it felt like a block of butter dipped in sugar, deep fried, and served with an excessive dose of table syrup; not so much sweet as nauseating. It proved that there’s no point in having great means if you have nothing great to say. Cinema quickly ruined itself as an art form; now it apparently set out to ruin dance too. And I’m telling you this so that, if Kiss & Cry left you feeling dead on the inside, you’ll know you’re not alone.

Here it is, the last dance show of the year. As customary, it is provided by the third-year students of L’École de Danse Contemporaine de Montréal and involves three pieces. The first two come courtesy of Montréal Danse and the last, an original creation for ÉDCM, is by visiting French choreographer Julien Desplantez.

Trois peaux, by Jean-Sébastien Lourdais

The human body transformed until it is no longer human, transformed until it is animal, but no particular animal: humanimal. Fists instead of hands, hunched over, head hanging low, on all fours. Mouvement half fluid/half stops, the organic interrupted by the robotic. (The music, which could be described as electrogrunts, reflects this aspect.) Sometimes, in passing, the dancers appear to be flexing, with their awkward arm positions. The body shakes, organic, too organic, uncontrollable. The movement is other, less articulated than that of human beings, but it says plenty of other things, things that cannot be understood and that are therefore unsettling.

Husk, by George Stamos

Already discussed at length here: http://www.localgestures.com/1/post/2012/02/husk-a-review.html
Only thing to add: did the costume Rachel Harris wore in the Montréal Danse version lose its dick? Why? Are the third-year students at ÉDCM not all adults? Is it because the show is mostly performed in front of their family and friends? And, most importantly, who cares? L’art n’est pas fait pour les demi-mesures.

Il y avait ce fou…, by Julien Desplantez

Thank God, the fashion-trash music that opens the piece soon subsides to offer us what school dance shows do best, i.e. the superficial pleasures of excess: a dozen dancers onstage from beginning to end, so much action that the eye cannot take it all in, synchronicity. Did Desplantez steal his small stationary steps from Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother? If so, good for him. Even though his choreography is not particularly innovative, it’s still less lazy and juvenile than Shechter’s. De la danse-bonbon.

December 19-22 at 7:30pm
Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal
www.edcmtl.com
514.873.4031 ext. 313
Tickets: 18$ / Students: 10$

Je l’avoue, parfois j’aimerais être une personne plus sociale. Mais, la plupart du temps, ce désir meurt lorsque j’écoute les conversations autour de moi, comme cette conversation à propos de films « oscarisables. » Who fucking cares?

Alors j’essaie de ne plus entendre; j’essaie de méditer. Je me concentre sur ma respiration. Il y a ces deux femmes assises en face de moi. Je ne vois que leur dos et leurs cheveux, mais je sais qu’elles y sont déjà. Malgré les quelques pieds et le silence qui nous séparent, je suis avec elles, et non pas avec les hommes de chaque côté de moi, dont les bras me frôlent, dont les paroles sont audibles, mais ne veulent (plus) rien dire.

Les femmes assises à même le plancher bougent de façon presque imperceptible. Un léger mouvement de tête ici et là, pas synchro, mais ensemble. C’est l’Aube de la chorégraphe Katia-Marie Germain.

Dans la petitesse de ses gestes et l’intériorité qui s’en découle, la chorégraphie n’est pas sans rappeler celle d’Erin Flynn. Les yeux des quatre interprètes demeurent fermés. Leur synchro, sentie plutôt que vue, révèle leur connexion psychique. Un beau silence partagé dans un monde de bruit.

La pièce aurait aussi bien pu s’appeler Tout est dit, il ne reste rien, mais c’est plutôt celle de Geneviève C. Ferron qui porte ce titre, tout aussi à propos. Phénomène rare : je n’ai pris aucune note durant la performance. Je ne voulais aucune distraction. Je voulais juste porter attention, tout absorber ce que je pouvais absorber.

Dans le noir, une montagne de lumières de Noël blanches apparaît, doucement. À ses pieds, cinq jeunes femmes, immobiles. Leurs corps se réveillent, réchauffer par les ampoules, s’activent tranquillement. Elles sont éclairées au minimum, à peine perceptibles.

Avec leur mouvement synchro, ralenti, souvent dans des positions où doigts et orteils s'étendent jusqu'au sol, elles ont l’air d’un troupeau s’adonnant à un rituel empreint de religiosité. Elles s’inclinent devant la montagne de lumière. Une jambe s’élève, droite, puis se fracture au genou. Elles arriveront éventuellement, sans empressement, à la rencontre de la source lumineuse, s'y mêleront même.

Je veux cette rencontre commune, silencieuse et patiente, avec la lumière. Pendant une heure, à Tangente, je l'ai eue.

6-8 décembre à 19h30 & 9 décembre à 16h
Monument-National
www.tangente.qc.ca
514.871.2224
Billets : 20$ / Étudiant : 16$