Another year is coming to an end and once again I find myself looking back to see what is still visible in the mass of dance I’ve taken in this past year. Out of this pile of now mostly indistinguishable shows, the letter A stands out, scarlet red.

While my love for contemporary dance stems from the unexpected that fuels the best shows, Tammy Forsythe’s Golpe showed me the limits of the medium by stepping well outside of them. As even one of its many detractors admitted, “J’ignorais […] qu’on pouvait être punk en danse contemporaine.” (Pablo Maneyrol) Sporting a DIY aesthetic, Golpe was raw, messy, and rough. It made me want to beat up anesthetically polished dance shows until blood started coming out of their pores, a most welcome sign of life dripping onto their bourgeois-wannabe clothes. Any so-called improvement that Golpe could have undergone would only have made it more generic. I would call it the most memorable show of the year if the French word “marquant” weren’t better, its “K” sound like a knife that cuts through the skin to leave a permanent scar. It’s thanks to Golpe that I can now entertain the hope that I might one day see a metal dance show.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s La Marche Invisible. While the definition of art is ever elusive, one still feels the certainty of being in the presence of a work that is deserving of the word at its most qualitative when watching Annie Gagnon’s creation. It was a perfect blend of dance, sculpture, music, lighting, and performance art. It showed the choreographer’s maturity as an artist.

This past year, I was also fortunate enough to be in New York City when legendary post-modern choreographer Trisha Brown was celebrating the 40th anniversary of her company. For the occasion, I got to see Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 (a work first performed in 1980) in the intimate space of the Baryshnikov Arts Center. When the curtains opened, a cloud of smoke rushed forward and made its way through the audience. Amidst these clouds, four dancers emerged, independently operating in silence for fifteen minutes. So when two of them suddenly jumped against one another at the exact same time, it had the effect of an earthquake. Like what everything is a matter of contrast.

Once again this year, Tangente (who was also behind La Marche Invisible) asserted itself as the venue for contemporary dance, programming challenging work that many bigger spaces would never touch. Nowhere was this more apparent than with their Idea-Based Dances program, a three-week event where conceptual works were allowed to shine. Ula Sickle’s Solid Gold especially stands out. Dancer Patrick Mbungu (aka Dinozord) single-handedly covered the entire spectrum of dance from the African diaspora, from its roots in the motherland to recent street styles coming out of Los Angeles. All this in a mere thirty minutes, with his breath and footsteps as his only soundtrack. The most impressive performance of the year.

Part of the same program, Tawny Andersen played with the intensity of her performance in Uncanny Valley. Armed with a deadpan sense of humour, she demonstrated that, to be compelling, one needn’t necessarily fall into excess.

At Agora de la danse, Michael Trent also surprised us with a conceptual work, It’s about time: 60 dances in 60 minutes. Five dancers repeated the same sequence of fifteen actions four times, each action first taking a minute, then fifteen seconds, three minutes, and a minute again. The playful experiment turned out to be a fascinating exploration of duration and its effects on both performers and audience members.

For their part, UQAM students proved once more that daring work does not only belong to the most seasoned choreographers. With her graduating work Chorus, Raphaëlle Perreault put on a show that unfolded like a great piece of minimalist music. Only after each movement had been repeated numerous times was the next movement allowed to come in, so that the choreography slowly but surely took us to a different place than where it had started. Her schoolmate Sarah Dell’ava showed how deeply committed she is to seeing her ideas through to the very end. With her first professional work Dans les carnets, she proceeded to unfurl a large roll of paper over the ten minutes the piece lasted. The mystery that clouded her process made the performance captivating.

A work that speaks to the spirit with which this selection is gathered is Michaël Cros’s Le Zoo “Chaleurhumaine”. While I greatly appreciated it when I saw it back in January, I did not expect it to find its way on this list. However, almost a year later, I find myself still haunted by its strangeness. In what is doubtlessly the best ambulatory performance piece of the last couple of years, audience members walked through a human zoo where two performers interacted with dummies entirely covered in black lycra. Disturbing images of racism, incest, and violence raised important questions about the nature of the modern zoo in this highly experiential work.

Last, but certainly not least, is Merce Cunningham’s Nearly 90. The late master’s ultimate work demonstrated why he is one of the most influential choreographers of the last century, his style so pure as to be monumental and timeless.

Though a few venues have beaten Tangente this year to the start of the dance season, my own has still begun the same way as it has the past few years: with Les Danses Buissonnières. The class of 2010 marks a shift from the work of earlier generations of choreographers, and certainly not for the worse.

With Y demeurer, Concordia graduate Katia-Marie Germain presents a duo that begins with small synchronized gestures observed by their performers, as if re-enacting past moments in an effort to understand what happened. They let themselves fall to the ground, as though hit by a flashback. These hits are replicated against one another, but the other is usually so limp that the impact ends up being less violent than it could be. Sometimes the impact even engenders a velocity that pushes the other away.

Unfortunately, Juilliard’s Allysen Hooks offers the weakest piece of the evening, in spite of its respectable ambitions. Though the opening is otherworldly as a man in a glistening grey one-piece costume carries a woman seemingly coming out of a tube that will reveal to be her inverted dress, the work quickly goes into familiar territory. Despite its futuristic look, Imadreation feels dated in the modern-dance-like characterization of its performers and in the choreography that is at times reminiscent of Merce Cunningham, like in the straight leg that Tad Adler-Arieli repeatedly raises at a perfect ninety-degree angle.

Maryse Damecour, a graduate from l’École de danse de Québec, presents an excerpt from her solo STAG. The beginning is compelling as Damecour is only lit by a slide projector, which fractures her movement into a series of mini tableaux. Some are still images are she remains motionless, while others have minimal movement. The length of each tableau varies from a few seconds to a fraction of a second as the projector flickers like a strobe light. Sadly, as light becomes a more permanent fixture and Damecour launches into a more typically formal dance, it becomes apparent that the choreography is not as fascinating as the creative use of the projector.

Even though UQAM graduate Sarah Dell’ava performs her solo Dans les carnets with no music and in a high key lighting that leaves nothing to the imagination, her piece is one of the most compelling, which speaks volumes about her artistry. She walks in the room carrying a large roll of paper over her shoulder, which she drops to the floor and proceeds to unroll and unfold over the course of the piece. As we had already seen with her previous work Les Trembles (in which three women were shaking over the thirty minutes the work lasted), Dell’ava fully commits to an idea and sees it through to the very end. Most admirable.

A new Montrealer, NYU graduate Dorian Nuskind-Oder presents a duet that makes great use of video, No Light Thing. A man and a woman’s twisted relationship is simultaneously presented to us en chair et en os as well as through a television screen that feeds off a camera capturing fragments of the performance live. Standing on the left side of the stage she looks at his back, while on the television screen that is on the right she faces him. He has to enter the television image by walking into the field of vision of the camera in order to see her. They switch positions to cheekily create a reverse over-the-shoulder shot, demonstrating the awkwardness of the cinematic device. As an audience, we must resist the impulse to privilege the television screen over the physical performers; the television offers us a proximity that borders on domesticity, reinforcing the exhibitionism of the performative act. This creepy interaction with technology is only slightly weakened by an emotionally facile storyline.

Concordia graduate Patrick Lloyd Brennan is going all out with Pre(fab): the uninvited. Nineteen dancers enter the room, the women in high heels and black one-piece swimsuits, the men in sneakers and black underwear. Four of them are carrying lamp posts that they distribute across the stage, the flexible light fixtures allowing them to focus the attention on specific areas of their bodies. Most of them stand at the front of the stage, their back to the audience, while one after another they walk towards the lights where in a detached manner they slowly pump and grind to the sounds of pop music. They usually limit themselves to the repetition of a single move, subdued by being performed with less energy than usually accompanies such overtly sexual performances. In the corner, dancers impatiently change songs, afflicted by a blasé form of attention deficit disorder. Pre(fab) walks a fine line between deconstructing and playing into sexual behaviour, enhancing the awareness of our visual desire by partially obstructing our view in a creative use of layering.

The evening ends with Attributs, by UQAM graduate Raphaëlle Perreault. Dressed in grey overalls, she and Nicolas Labelle look like workers whose movement is spurred by the accomplishment of specific tasks. They run or jump over four beams of light, turning the piece into a friendly competition as they compare feats. As the work progresses, their movement becomes more complex, setting dance up as an extension of labour.

The most noticeable changes from recent editions of Danses Buissonnières are the diminishing use of humour and the taking up of a more conceptual and cerebral approach to dance. As a result, the work of these young choreographers achieves a new level of maturity. Overall, the class of 2010 might just be offering the best Danses Buissonnières I’ve yet had the chance to attend, with Dell’ava and Lloyd Brennan moving to the head of the class.

Danses Buissonnières – Classe 2010
September 16-18 at 7:30pm, September 18-19 at 4pm
Tangente
www.tangente.qc.ca
514-525-1500
Tickets: 18$/Students: 14$

This week, it’s the turn of the “graduates” from last year’s edition of Danses Buissonnières to take the stage at Tangente. Dominique Thomas, Andrée-Anne Ratthé, and Thierry Huard are the young choreographers who were selected to each present a twenty-minute piece. All three sport all-female casts, but their works are certainly not limited to restricted ideas about femininity, as can be seen in their diversity.

It’s with great violence that Dominique Thomas’s Nocturne pour femmes oubliées begins, a woman pulling another by a rope that is tied to the latter’s hands and feet. A third woman looks on silently. While the torturous relationship between the three women is well drawn in Thomas’s partner work, the work suffers greatly once they stop being in direct physical contact. The choreography is then nowhere near as strong. There is a bit more of an impact when the three dancers move to the front of the stage and awkwardly put on lipstick by having all their limbs spread out and applying the makeup at a very slow pace. Still, the use of makeup as a symbol for femininity is cliché, as is its subversion when they use the lipstick to draw fat lines under their eyes, like football players.

From the get-go, Andrée-Anne Ratthé’s Le déterminant un offers a refreshing change of pace. Rock music blasts over the speakers, though its high energy is not matched on stage since all that can be found there is a body pillow resting on a chair. Soon though, Corinne Crane-Desmarais walk to the front of the stage like a woman on a mission, boldly staring us down in her Levi’s jeans and black Suicidal Tendencies t-shirt. She walks off and exits the stage before coming right back through another door and repeating the sequence.

A lot of the humour in Le déterminant un is drawn from the steps that the four dancers execute in unison. They create a rhythm with their shoes as they hit the floor, the regularity of which causes them to run on the spot in a silly fashion. This constant rhythm gives the piece a great musical quality, as though its performers were laying the track for percussions while the rest of the music – rock, no doubt – remains inaudible to us. Their sudden shifts from loud to quiet are particularly funny.

Human drama is made to look trivial as dancers take out their frustrations on the body pillow. They wrestle with it, only winning the fight because they are competing against a completely defenceless object. Dancer Raphaëlle Perreault lifts it as though it were a heavy barbell, openly mocking human posturing. Contemporary dance could stand to be a bit more rock n’ roll, so Ratthé’s creation is most welcome.

Thierry Huard, for his part, maintains his pop aesthetic with fall/winter 2012: the Goddess’ return. Even though Fever Ray is playing at the beginning of the piece, what occurs onstage still manages to be creepy. It takes place in quasi-darkness where, in the distance, we can make out three creatures. One of them, wearing a black hood covered in small golden medallions, is shaking its head.

Somewhere between religious ceremonies and fashion shows, Huard’s work is a series of strange rituals. The costumes the performers wear are pastiches that somehow work because of their eclectic use of mismatched colours, materials, and styles. When dancers exchange clothing articles, no one looks the worse off for it.

As far as Huard’s work is concerned, the longer the piece, the better. It allows him to go further and avoid the pitfalls of vapidity by building up atmospheres.

If there is another point common to all three works, it is a difficulty at managing the transitions between sections. The exits are sometimes awkward, while at other times the performers remain onstage when it would probably be better if they didn’t. A small kink that these emerging choreographers will no doubt iron out over the next few years.

Danses Buissonnières – Les Gradués
September 23-25 at 7:30pm, September 26 at 4pm
Tangente
www.tangente.qc.ca
514-525-1500
Tickets: 18$/Students: 14$

Rare are the dance shows in which the hands appear as the primary focal point. Less surprising that they would be so in a performance by the Japanese butoh company Sankai Juku. Following the praise that their show Kagemi engendered when it passed through town in 2006, Danse Danse has invited the company back to open their new season with their award-winning Hibiki (Resonance from Far Away). Once again, choreographer Ushio Amagatsu does not disappoint.

A dozen clear, shallow saucers are spread across the stage, filled with water. Above four of them, glass bulbs filled with water are slowly emptying themselves, one drop at a time. In certain sections, as in the opening, the sound of each drop falling into the water below is amplified and resonates, aurally enveloping us. It is in this environment that the creatures that populate Hibiki evolve. A single figure at first, dressed in a white robe that matches the colour of the powder that covers its body. Its relationship with the world is primarily communicated through its hands. The fingers are curled up as the arms move downward, but when they reach their lowest point, the fingers suddenly open up, thirsty for life. They also open when they point towards the sky, like flowers that crave the falling drops of water.

It is a movement progression that the other five dancers replicate in the following tableau, but with their entire body. At first they are lying down next to the saucers, also curled up. They are slowly waking up to the world, temporarily swaying between two worlds: sleep and wakefulness, blindness and consciousness, death and life. They manage to stand up, but fall back to the ground, still weak.

More than once, the hands of the dancers undulate on their way down, like waterfalls, before meeting in front of the belly. By doing so, they connect the flow of life to the core of the human body. The arms appear as the channels of life through which emotional states flow and can be observed.

These instruments of life can however also become instrumental in their own destruction. Four figures appear around a saucer, the liquid in the recipient now red. While these four creatures are still covered in white, the laces that tie up their corsets are red. The laces look like long scars, like sutures that hold each side of the chest together after it had been ripped open. The fingers become scissors or blades that slice the air before letting invisible body parts fall in the bloody waters.

Despite the slow pace of Hibiki, it does not simply instil a feeling of peacefulness. It successfully communicates the torment that comes with human struggles. Mouths open in silent screams, more powerful than if sounds emerged. Despite its source, sound would be too exterior to the body, while here the horror remains locked inside. With such moments, Amagatsu proves that torment does not have to be communicated through melodramatic excess, that it can quietly creep inside stillness.

Rebirth awaits the creatures though as they raise their faces to the skies to look for answers or, better yet, to look outside the pettiness of human existence towards a generously open space. When they repeatedly jump and let themselves fall, it is no longer subject to their own weakness, but in full control of their body. As light fills the stage, the hands spread out, embracing the air as if it were through them that one breathes.

Hibiki (Resonance from Far Away)
September 30-October 2, 8pm
Théâtre Maisonneuve in Place des Arts
www.dansedanse.net / www.laplacedesarts.com
514.842.2112 / 1.866.842.2112
Tickets start at 32$

“You’re born naked,” a friend reminded me recently. “Everything else is drag.” He was shamelessly stealing from RuPaul.

It’s a thought that came back to me last week during George Stamos’s Cloak at Agora de la danse. He and his dance partner Luciane Pinto change costumes as if a different personality came along with each of them. Even their first costume on its own refuses to confer them a one-dimensional personality: Pinto’s t-shirt reads “bisexual”, and Stamos’s, “polynomial”.

The previous work that Stamos presented at Agora de la danse a couple of years ago, reservoir-pneumatic, was heavy on the dance. With Cloak, he rekindles with interdisciplinary practices and a more liberal approach to performance. Dayna McLeod’s video work is a key component and, in his usual style, Stamos interacts with the screen it is projected on rather than letting it become a flat space.

But it is first with a microphone that Stamos interacts, creating a rhythm by tapping it on his chest and rubbing it against his pants. Such rhythms become the soundtrack to both dancers’ movement as they seamlessly transition from performance to choreography by needlessly passing the microphone cord around them, creating excessive movement.

They loop sounds as varied as biting down on a carrot (crunch!), breathing, galloping, and humming. On the floor, they also loop their movement. They get down on the floor as though performing a one-arm pushup, then slipping the free arm underneath the stretched out one, creating a rotation that can be looped endlessly. Stamos frequently uses movements that serve to engender rotations of the body, fueling the dance with great dynamism.

Often, Stamos uses video to provide a digital upper body for the dancers’ legs. Once he gets behind the screen on which an ever-morphing face appears, at turns appearing feline, robotic, or reptilian. Underneath he contorts his body, arms, and hands, as if he is trying to find a body and movement for each version of the digital head. He is articulating different possibilities, highlighting the mutability of the multiple identities that can be found within a single being.

One moment Pinto is wearing a black dress, the next it is Stamos who slips it on. He is in drag; she wasn’t. Stamos often plays with the effect of gender on social perception. Once, Pinto comes out in rubber boots, a camouflage shirt, and an orange-cone-coloured hat. Her movement does not match the body from which it emerges: her back is hunched over, as though she is much older, and the way she carries herself is more masculine. However, her movement is also fragmented, as though to acknowledge that she is only animating a stereotype in jerky stop motion.

This interaction between genders is split more cleanly in the section where Stamos’s naked torso appears on the video screen while it is Pinto’s legs that can be found underneath. Her legs spread open in a most subjective manner, conferring an overt sexuality to Stamos’s upper body that would usually be deemed inappropriate for a man.

Cloak ends on a tableau in which images of audience members are projected on the screen between Stamos and Pinto. The device falls flat at first, but then Stamos pushes the screen so that it swings from side to side, infusing the experiment with a newfound meaning. From then on, we only see the image of the people when the screen catches the projector’s light in passing. It is as if each person’s identity is shown to be transitional – and therefore ephemeral – existing only when there is a screen upon which it can be projected.

Cloak is more intimate than reservoir-pneumatic, and it’s nice to see Stamos rekindling with the kind of work he’s perfected on smaller stages.

For more information on George Stamos: www.georgestamos.org
For more information on Agora de la danse’s 20th season: www.agoradanse.com

Back in June, Winnipeg artist Freya Björg Olafson came to Montreal to present two short pieces at the OFFTA, New Icelander and AVATAR. The latter was a 12-minute excerpt of an hour-long show that, fortunately for us, Olafson is presenting this week in its integral version at Tangente. Fortunately because the AVATAR excerpt proved to be charming and full of wit in its study of the relationship that people entertain with the camera… on their computer. Appropriately, Olafson has even taken to performing parts of the work on platforms such as Chatroulette and Ustream.tv. As she was getting ready to come to Montreal, we exchanged a few emails…

SYLVAIN VERSTRICHT: Even though people use technology now to very public ends (Facebook, YouTube, etc), these uses usually originate in the privacy of one’s own home. How did you go about translating this private experience into a stage performance?

FREYA OLAFSON: I became curious about the line between public and private that is negotiated when one broadcasts to an unknown public from a personal computer in the private space of the home. In my research I became increasingly interested when I found confessional-style videos where vloggers would bring the camera into the bathroom, to recount private or rather personal information. Even more curious when I realized that these vloggers are unaware of who might be there. When you put content online it is not considered broadcasting [but] rather narrowcasting; people only find your video by the tags you associate with your video.

This intimate relationship with the camera opens the contemporary territory of the video diary. A diary open to whomever clicks on it. A video diary where one exchanges back and forth with other YouTube community members. A diary where the writer appears to be critically aware of the audience or viewership. This often leads to a stream of apologies for one’s appearance and technical shortcomings.

The text in AVATAR engages a personal tone, the self as subject. All the audio text and spoken text in the full work is gathered from four YouTube users, slightly edited and re-contextualized to the performance space of the stage.

Onstage this interest is translated through proximity to the camera, coming real close, being intimate with the documenting device. I just discovered this work of Vito Acconci on UBUweb:

Link to Acconci’s Theme Song

Such a curious beckoning relationship to the camera. Amusing.

About midway through the work I engage in a revealing process, first through using a live DIY blue screen that allowed me to bring a virtual domestic space onto the stage: first a bathroom (changing bathrooms eventually), then a bedroom, and finally a space that is universally understood (I won’t reveal this now, you will see it at the show!).

The work also engages objectified self-representation of the body, revealing more than perhaps should be, mainly through the detached gestures of the anonymous headless striptease. So many videos cut off the head and show the body in underwear. A somehow deeply personal representation of the self, yet at the same time entirely de-personalized – faceless bodies……

SV: How do you reconcile being critical of YouTube and recognizing its potential as its own distinct medium?

FO: I think part of being a contemporary citizen in a fast changing society involves being critical of new tools, media in particular. Acknowledging how new tools change or have the potential to change one’s use of time, sense of self, and relationships with others. The worth of these new tools is all in how you use them – it is up to the individual users to figure out how it fits in their lives. If one is not critical, it is easy to fall into habits and patterns, coping out for its ease of use, employing to the fullest its potential for distraction. I think one needs to be critical, so that the individual is the one employing and utilizing the tool… not the tool using the individual.

AVATAR
October 14-16 at 7:30pm, October 17 at 4pm
Tangente
www.tangente.qc.ca
514.525.1500
Tickets: 18$/Students: 14$

It’s one of the most anticipated events of the season, and with good cause. The National Ballet of Canada hasn’t visited Montreal in seven years and it’s bringing no fewer than 38 dancers to perform Crystal Pite’s Dora Movar Moore Award-winning Emergence. As if that weren’t enough, the evening begins with a work from Quebec’s very own Marie Chouinard, 24 Preludes by Chopin, which she adapted for 17 dancers. Chouinard got costume designer Liz Vandal to dress up the dancers in black see-through clothing in which a few narrow black strips cover up the body parts that an American broadcast network couldn’t show on television. The long hair of the women is braided, while the men’s hair is pushed to the top of their head in pseudo-mohawks. It’s S&M meets raver goth (trying to be cyber punk goth).

In a rare move for a Quebec choreographer, Chouinard gets dancers to illustrate individual notes from Chopin’s preludes, impeccably performed by live pianist Edward Connell. There is a tension in the dance between mechanical and animalistic movements, not that the two are mutually exclusive. A man stands on his two legs, but his back is curved so that what we see is the top of his head. His arms are stretched forward in perfect lines, his hands also straight but pointing outwards at a 90-degree angle. The movement executed by both arms and hands while maintaining straight lines is as precise as that of a clock. Later, a woman suspended from her male partner’s arms sways from side to side like a pendulum. Other dancers look like their elbows are unhinged.

More organic movement can be observed when men lift women, the latter gesticulating excessively when they reach their highest point. Seeing an orgasmic image in this section wouldn’t be inappropriate considering the sexual overtones of much of Chouinard’s work. Near the end, a woman’s arms are being held back by a man while she attempts to move forward, making her look like a horse being reined in. It is not the only example of a twisted relationship between the sexes.

The highlight of the many tableaux, however, falls under the more purely mechanical category. In the section in question, three women simply rotate their right arm at high speeds in unison. The lighting is stroboscopic and lends the image a highly filmic quality. The action seems to unfold at 16 frames per second, both sped up and fragmented. The dancers are moving their arms at such a velocity that at certain moments we can see more than three arms hanging off their right shoulders.

Though shorter in length, Pite’s Emergence packs even more punch. The large number of dancers in her piece surely has a lot to do with it. Inspired by the life of insects (bees in particular), Emergence is fortunately not limited to any one simplistic image or reading. Behind their black masks, the women whisper “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6”, as though performing an incantation at some occult gathering. The dancers’ hands sometimes hang down, crooked, like claws. At this moment, Owen Belton’s original score (one of the best we have heard in quite some time) sounds like beaks tapping on the hard bark of trees, bringing forth the image of birds.

The most persistent image, however, is that of the military. An appropriate one for a bee hive… or a ballet company. The “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6” starts to sound more and more like a “left, right, left, right”, rigidly coordinating the movement of the many dancers. On the soundtrack, the sound of heavy feet marching in step. As the 38 dancers synchronously execute the same movements for the finale, the effect is powerful, the company engaging in the full display of their military power.

24 Preludes by Chopin & Emergence
October 15 & 16 at 8pm
Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts
www.dansedanse.net / www.laplacedesarts.com
514.842.2112 / 1.866.842.2112
Tickets start at 35$

The inseparable duo formed by Sasha Kleinplatz and Andrew Tay is about to be separated (at least partially) this week at Tangente. While they are still coming together under their company name Wants&Needs to offer an evening of dance, this time around they have individually choreographed their own piece. As my email exchanges with them point to, that is not necessarily to say that their pieces have nothing in common: both have been playing with notions of gender in their more recent work.

On Power and Permission

SYLVAIN VERSTRICHT: You’ve been entertaining an interesting relationship with women in your work lately. Women acting like puppets controlled by you, ripping your clothes off, getting undressed for you… It could easily be construed as misogynist if it weren’t so self aware, not to mention that it often turns on you. Given the title of your new piece [On Power and Permission] and the casting [Tay is surrounded by three women dancers], I assume it’s something you’re still exploring. How do you approach the relationship between the sexes in your work?

ANDREW TAY: I think I’ve definitely become obsessed with how society perceives ideas of masculine and feminine. For this work we’ve been investigating all different types of male/female relationships… including some images that could almost be considered misogynistic. The interesting thing is that it never ends up being so cut and dry. Often we set out in the studio to create something where the masculine element (myself) is in control, and by the end we are questioning whether or not this is actually what is being perceived. I also play a lot with fantasy to encourage people to question preconceived male/female gender roles. Both male and female elements in this work have their moments of being sexually objectified, being in a position of servitude, and being in a position of ultimate power.

SV: I think that’s why it works so well: because of the ambiguity. When it comes to choreography, you often end up in precarious positions (like trying to stand on the tip of your toes) that make it hard to maintain your balance. What is your process when it comes to dance? Do you work from external images or from inner states and work your way outward?

AT: It’s funny you ask this question because I use both as a starting point depending on the situation. It’s interesting because both points of departure always lead back to one another for me. Often I work with a sensation or physical/emotional state, which as I develop brings me towards an image. Or alternately sometimes I have a very clear image in my head that I want to explore and this takes me towards a state or a physical sensation. I am finding that a lot of my work of late has a transformative quality; I like to see small sensation-based movements change over time into really strong images or, vice versa, to take powerful images and gradually alter their meaning through the movement vocabulary. I think that I would also say that I am definitely trying to find a bizarre but authentic physical world. I really trip on small intense muscle flexion, hunched over positions and a really stark kind of musicality with lots of space between movements.

All the Ladies

SV: Your dances often sport all-female casts, but you certainly don’t go for any stereotypical conceptions of femininity. Your choreography is intensely physical and, one might even say, butch. How does gender factor in your work?

SASHA KLEINPLATZ: I’d say that I’m currently investigating the social roles women assign to themselves and one another when they are functioning together as a group. How these roles are constantly in flux due to the dynamics of power relationships. The performance space in this new piece [All the Ladies] proposes a sort of “man free” zone where the dancers are acting out roles using randomly sampled archetypes and fantasies taken from everyday culture, sometimes challenging these archetypes, sometimes submitting to them playfully. Basically, I’m interested in how women relate with each other in life, in the studio, and onstage. SV: I was thinking last night that I’ve never seen you dance. Is there a particular reason why you prefer to focus on the role of choreographer?

SK: I think for me it’s just way easier to see the piece from the outside. There’s so much organizing with bodies, timing, space, props, music, and costumes, seeing how all of [those] things look and affect the work – I can’t imagine trying to do all that and perform at the same time. Although this is really conjecture on my part because I never have danced in my own work. Maybe I’d love it…

All the Ladies & On Power and Permission
October 21-23 at 7:30pm, October 24 at 4pm
Tangente
www.tangente.qc.ca
514.525.1500
Tickets: 18$/Students: 14$

A woman walks towards us. On her head, a helmet from which two long antennas appear as ears. “Je suis un lapin qui a peur de tout ce qui n’a pas de nom,” she tells us. The audience chuckles. And yet… How much does one need to do to be perceived as a rabbit? No doubt most of us had already recognized that the antennas standing on the woman’s head looked like rabbit ears. How would our reaction to her statement that she is a rabbit have differed if she weren’t wearing long ears? Why is it that, depending on her costume, the same statement would seem more or less true?

In her new work Tous les noms, choreographer-dancer-and-so-much-more María Muñoz explores our incessant desire to name things. After all, it is not only her rabbit character Carnaval who fears all that is without a name.

When Muñoz comes back onstage, she looks like a completely different person. She has lost her rabbit ears, but it is not the only reason behind the change. Her entire being looks different. Muñoz is not just a dancer but an actress of the first order. She deftly switches from comedy to drama. From one tableau to another, her body is transformed. She contains a multitude. She is all names.

Her first dance is also the strongest. The movement is slow, but excessive. The toes stretch and spread in the air and on their way down until they touch the ground, coming into contact with it in the utmost possible comfort. The back bends down and stretches up. The arms fold and unfold. The head falls forward and straightens up. Despite this excessive movement, it is a serene quality that emerges from it, Muñoz able to manage all movements. The body will do what it has to in order to remain standing.

A video projection of words falls upon Muñoz’s body, but they are only readable when she holds a pale sheet in front of them. How do these words affect the way we perceive her? At least, in this case the words are of her own choosing. They are projected onto her, but it is her who determines their level of readability, picking labels for herself from a number of possibilities.

Can one be all names though? Neither Muñoz’s dancing nor her acting point in that direction. When she attempts to cover the two spaces that she individually covers in the first two dance sections of Tous les noms, the choreography only suffers. It becomes impossible for her to be all things in all spaces. Similarly, when she reads she needs a magnifying glass that only covers a small portion of the reading surface. It is only possible to see a limited number of things at once.

The abundance of names submerges us in memorable images, like the one of Muñoz sleeping while words appear on three banners that rotate around her. It is a nightmarish image, her subconscious drowning in too many names. Some names have so many layers of meaning as absolutes that they can come to overlap, she tells us. Like God and shit, for example. Just think of these words at their briefest, as exclamations… Shit! God!

“L’identité, ça sert à ça,” Muñoz says as she forms a ball with her hands and shakes it all about until the movement is so big that it turns into a dance. Identity is something to be played with, to be danced with even. Just as much as words can constrain, they can also open up new possibilities. “Mets-toi en position de départ… et maintenant, vole!” Muñoz throws herself on a wheeled cart and it rolls forward. If only for a fraction of a second, it does look like she is floating through the air.

Tous les noms
October 20-22 at 8pm
Agora de la danse
www.agoradanse.com
514.525.1500
Tickets: 26$/Students and those under 31 years of age: 18$

Lights that form strips that form crosses that form squares that form grids. At the top three corners of a cross of light, three women. The feminine trinity. In the name of the mother, the daughter, and the horny spirit.

For La femme territoire ou 21 fragments d’humus, musician Joane Hétu has surrounded herself with a precious team of collaborators. A musician with a background in acting, Alice Tougas St-Jak brings a youthful energy to the work. Dancer and musician Susanna Hood attempts to make the piece more visual with a few choice choreographies. Musicians Isaiah Ceccarelli and Jean Derome wrap up this “nomadic” team.

La femme territoire is Hétu’s baby, a musique actuelle concert that attempts to become a show with little success. To that effect, choreographer Catherine Tardif lends a hand to the mise en scène. Unfortunately, La femme territoire remains closer to Cagibi’s Mardi Spaghetti than to a visually stimulating show.

With her strange demeanour, Hood is perfectly cast in Hétu’s equally discomforting world. However, the few dance pieces she performs are rather forgettable. An exception is an early one, in which she embodies the e-n-t-h-o-u-s-i-a-s-m she repeatedly spells out. For this section, she wears a white dress composed of many layers of large paper fringes that she rustles with her excessive arm movement. Child-like and funny.

There are a few good sections, but rarely because of their visual qualities. There is, for example, the quartet performed by slowly removing an until-then invisible tape from the black floor. Or the section where Ceccarelli and Derome play with nouns and adjectives and the way they interact with the feminine and the masculine in French, repeating such sentences as “L’amoureuse amoureuse de son amoureux. La tripotteuse tripotteuse de son tripotteux.” The quick repetition of such sentences in succession turn them into a sing-song mantra, as calming as it is humorous.

In one of the many spoken word sections, Hétu enumerates many ways of “parler de la chose” (the “thing” in question being, of course, sex). A good list of synonyms to have on hand to write a romance novel, though metaphors for sex are always more cringe-worthy than the actual thing they seek to describe. Better stick to the most literal words, no matter how graphic.

There is some irony to the fact that one of the sections is titled “Pensées sur l’art en vrac.” No one could accuse Hétu of such crimes against art with her avant-garde practice, but the same could not be said of other components of the show. The video by Mélanie Ladouceur, for example, is particularly generic. Its content is most always a direct representation of the topic at hand, but abstract enough not to overpower the action onstage. In other words, it’s moving tapestry, meant to be in the background and stay there, barely adding anything to the show. Even more grating for video lovers such as myself, it is used in an attempt to smooth over transitions between sections as the artists move around onstage. It is one more component that is simply there to try to make this concert more visual, but that fails to justify its own presence.

La femme territoire is a concert that wants to grow up to be a show, but that would still probably gain by being performed in music venues until its clothes are actually too small for it.

La femme territoire ou 21 fragments d’humus
October 28-30 at 7:30pm, October 31 at 4pm
Tangente
www.tangente.qc.ca
514.525.1500
Tickets: 18$/Students: 14$