1. Tragédie, Olivier Dubois (Danse Danse)
Avec son opus pour dix-huit danseurs nus, Dubois a abordé les grands thèmes (le passage du temps, la mortalité, la petitesse de la vie humaine, le rôle de l’art, l’humanité) en prenant son temps, en n’empruntant aucun raccourci facile, en laissant le sens émerger de lui-même.

2. Uncanny Valley Stuff, Dana Michel (Usine C)
Avec Uncanny Valley Stuff, Michel a continué sa recherche entamée avec Yellow Towel, spectacle qui figure dans le top dix du magazine new-yorkais Time Out et pour lequel le prestigieux festival ImPulsTanz a créé un prix spécialement pour elle. Sa nouvelle courte pièce est toute aussi incisive mais encore plus drôle. En empilant les clichés sur les Noirs jusqu’à ce qu’ils s’entremêlent et se contredisent, Michel démontre l’absurdité de ces stéréotypes qui nous présentent une vision déformée du monde.

3. Antigone Sr.: Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church (L), Trajal Harrell (Festival TransAmériques)
Antigone Sr. a probablement été le spectacle de danse qui a créé le plus de divisions cette année. On pourrait diviser le public en trois : ceux qui ont quitté la salle, ceux qui sont restés assis les bras croisés, et ceux qui se sont levés pour danser. Il n’est donc pas surprenant que le spectacle se retrouve dans mon palmarès. Il faut dire que je suis queer et que j’ai une affinité pour la danse post-moderne, ce qui me donne une double porte d’entrée sur le sujet. Pour ceux qui n’ont pas eu l’endurance nécessaire pour passer à travers ce défilé de mode DIY de deux heures, il serait bon de noter que les plus grands bals qui ont inspiré la pièce pouvaient durer jusqu’à dix heures de temps; comptez-vous chanceux! Peut-être comprenez-vous maintenant un peu mieux ce que c’est que de se sentir aliéné par la culture dominante.

4. Monsters, Angels and Aliens Are Not a Substitute for Spirituality…, Andrew Tay (OFFTA)
Pour être honnête, lorsque j’ai vu la nouvelle pièce de Tay, qui vire de plus en plus dans le performance art, je me suis demandé si j’étais en train de regarder un artiste perdre la tête sur scène ou si Tay était en contrôle de son art. J’étais évidemment assez intrigué pour découvrir la réponse avec Summoning Aesthetics qu’il a ensuite présenté avec François Lalumière au Festival Phénomena. Conclusion : Tay continue dans la même veine ritualiste, sachant clairement dans quelle direction il va même s’il ne connaît pas nécessairement sa destination. J’ai admiré qu’il ait pris la décision de terminer Monsters sur une note différente de ce qu’il avait prévu pendant la représentation même. La misogynie latente qui avait l’habitude d’hanter ses pièces est disparue. Ce qui demeure est son ludisme, son humour et son ouverture aux expériences, peu importe ce qu’elles s’avèrent être. Si je me souviens bien, un spectateur avait qualifié Summoning Aesthetics « d’honnêteté perverse. » Cela me semble aussi approprié.

5. Built to Last, Meg Stuart (Festival TransAmériques)
Avec Built to Last, Stuart (qui a reçu le Grand Prix de la Danse de Montréal) a abordé des thèmes similaires à ceux de Tragédie d’Olivier Dubois, mais de façon beaucoup plus théâtrale. En juxtaposant un immense mobile de notre système solaire avec une maquette d’un tyrannosaure et la danse contemporaine avec la musique classique, Stuart a démontré l’insignifiance des actions humaines et que notre seule rédemption possible se trouve dans l’art.

6. Florilège, Margie Gillis (Agora de la danse)
Pour célébrer ses quarante ans de carrière, Gillis nous a offert cinq pièces de son répertoire revisitant les années 1978 à 1997. Par le fait même, elle nous a rappelé pourquoi elle est devenue une danseuse de telle renommée. L’intangible se manifeste à travers son corps, soulignant la fragilité de l’humain dans un univers chaotique.

7. Mange-moi, Andréane Leclerc (Tangente)
Leclerc a utilisé la contorsion et la nudité pour aborder les relations de pouvoir entre les individus lorsque notre survie dépend des autres. Qu’elle puisse s’attaquer à de telles questions tout en offrant une des pièces les plus sensorielles de l’année démontre l’intelligence de son travail.

8. Tête-à-Tête, Stéphane Gladyszewski (Agora de la danse)
Ma réaction à ma sortie de cette pièce de quinze minutes pour un seul spectateur à la fois : on doit donner à Gladyszewski tout l’argent dont il a besoin pour réaliser ses projets. Aucun autre chorégraphe n’arrive à intégrer la technologie avec autant d’adresse. Tête-à-Tête était à la fois intime, inquiétant et magique.

9. The Nutcracker, Maria Kefirova (Tangente)
L’excentrique Kefirova a troqué l’écran vidéo pour des haut-parleurs et a démontré qu’elle maîtrise le son avec autant de flair que l’image. « Elle n’utilise pas le son pour meubler le silence comme le fond maints spectacles, mais pour matérialiser l’invisible, » disais-je. Difficile d’oublier la satisfaction ressentie lors de l’exutoire du tableau final, où Kefirova s’acharne à faire éclater des noix de Grenoble en morceaux en se servant de ses chaussures à talons hauts comme casse-noisette.

10. Junkyard/Paradis remix, Catherine Vidal (Usine C)
J’espère avoir assez établi le fait que je suis un fan fini de Mélanie Demers pour pouvoir dire ceci (qui, je crois, n’est pas l’opinion populaire) : Junkyard/Paradis est probablement sa pièce que j’aime le moins. Lors de l’événement MAYDAY remix, où la chorégraphe a laissé des artistes remixer son travail, la metteure en scène Catherine Vidal a donné au spectacle la structure dramatique qu’il méritait avec une fin des plus jubilatoires.

11. loveloss, Michael Trent (Agora de la danse)
Extrait de ma critique : « Trent n’a toujours pas peur de prendre le temps qu’il faut. De plus, il évite ici l’humour, le théâtral et le mouvement séducteur (athlétique, rapide, synchronisé), toutes ces astuces que des chorégraphes moins confiants utilisent pour que leur dance soit plus accessible. L’interprétation est sentie sans être affectée. loveloss est une œuvre touchante … »

12. Milieu de nulle part, Jean-Sébastien Lourdais (Agora de la danse)
Pour la performance de l’année, celle de Sophie Corriveau, qui s’est méritée la toute première résidence de création pour interprètes offerte par l’Agora de la danse. Notons que le diffuseur s’est démarqué avec une programmation solide pour une deuxième année consécutive.

On April 10, Wants&Needs Danse will be presenting the 14th edition of their popular Short&Sweet series in conjunction with the Art Curator's Association of Quebec's "Envisioning the Practice" conference, which looks at Performing Arts Curation. For the occasion, here is an interview that had been conducted with organizers Sasha Kleinplatz and Andrew Tay for the 7th edition of Short&Sweet.

SYLVAIN VERSTRICHT: I've been thinking about [Short&Sweet] in terms of artistic direction and, given the high number of choreographers that get to show work, that maybe the best artistic direction is to have none at all. How do you choose who is going to present work?

SASHA KLEINPLATZ: I think what we do is try to get people who represent different parts of the contemporary dance community in Montreal. Basically, we will try to make sure we have artists who are young, mid-career, and established. We also try to have a balance between different types of work, i.e. artists who create more cerebral or conceptual work versus artists who create work that is very movement based. We also try to include some artists who aren't necessarily working in the contemporary dance milieu; for example, we have asked clowns, performance artists, hip hop choreographers and puppeteers in the past.

I think as curators we believe our challenge with Short&Sweet is community building and creating dialogue. At the same time we try to ask people who we think would make good use of this particular kind of performance situation.

SYLVAIN: It also seems that, even though the Montreal dance community is rather small and everyone knows each other, there is still a bit of a divide between francophone and anglophone artists. Short&Sweet is one of the few times when I feel like that line gets somewhat erased. Am I wrong in assuming this and is this something that's important to you?

ANDREW TAY: It is definitely something that we think about, and we feel like this is part of what makes Short&Sweet fun and interesting. Homogeny can definitely be boring and every good party needs a good mix of people. I think that we are trying to breed a curiosity among artists to see all the different types of dance ideas that are out there no matter where they are coming from. This curiosity creates an atmosphere that transcends boundaries such as language... We also think this situation is really unique to Montreal and important! I was at a symposium recently that was talking about the so-called anglo - franco culture divide and some people were arguing that a bilingual audience doesn't exist. I totally disagree with this and I think events like Short&Sweet prove it is an exciting possibility. I think we are lucky since dance is not necessarily a language-based art form and because of this we have more opportunity to cultivate this kind of audience.

SYLVAIN: For this edition of Short&Sweet, you asked choreographers to collaborate with artists from other disciplines. Dance always strikes me as being particularly collaborative, so I was wondering how this constraint concretely affected your piece this time around…

SASHA: I know for me it felt like an opportunity to take a chance with collaborators I have never worked with before. Because the piece is short I felt comfortable treating the collaboration as a blind date between myself and the two collaborators and interpreters (musician John Milchem, performance artist Adriana Disman, and interpreters Nathan Yaffe and Susan Paulson). We have all agreed that the process of the collaboration is as interesting as the outcome/performance. We were all just excited to see what working together yields. For me this goes back to the original spirit of experimentation and risk-taking that I was looking for when Andrew and I conceived of Short&Sweet.

Short & Sweet #14
April 10 at 10pm
La Sala Rossa
https://www.facebook.com/events/371765872964691/?fref=ts
Tickets: 10$

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.