Local Gestures
because the personal is cultural
Salves, Maguy Marin (Danse Danse) Septembre 26-28 Because last time Marin was in town, it was back in 2007 with Umwelt, which still holds as one of the best shows performed in Montreal this past decade. Prismes, Benoît Lachambre (L’Agora de la danse) October 16-19 Because Lachambre made quite the comeback last year with Snakeskins, his best show in years. Henri Michaux: Mouvements + Gymnopédies, Marie Chouinard (Danse Danse) October 31-November 2 Because Chouinard’s last show, LE NOMBRE D’OR (LIVE), is the one that has had the biggest impact on me since performer Carole Prieur first translated Henri Michaux’s drawings into dance back in 2005. We can only imagine what it will be like when all the dancers of the company will follow in her footsteps. Cuire Le Pain De Nos Corps, Sarah Dell’ava (Tangente) November 21-24 Because Dell’ava is probably the most intelligent mover in Montreal. LA VALEUR DES CHOSES, Jacques Poulin-Denis (Lachapelle) January 21-25 Because Poulin-Denis manages to expose the absurdity of human life while remaining funny and touching. The Nutcracker, Maria Kefirova (Tangente) January 30-February 2 Because Kefirova is one of the few choreographers in Montreal who knows how to deal with video in live performance. The adaptation project, Michael Trent (L’Agora de la danse) February 12-14 Because the last time Trent was in Montreal, he surprised everyone by being as conceptual as he was playful. Reviens Vers Moi Le Ventre En Premier, Annie Gagnon (Tangente) February 27-March 2 Because she’s one of the few choreographers in Montreal who’s not afraid to be serious. Mayday remix, Mélanie Demers (Usine C) March 12-14 Because, with just a few works, Demers has managed to establish herself as one of the most consistently good dancemakers in Montreal and it will be a treat to see her revisit her past works before moving on to the next artistic stage in her career. Mange-Moi, Andréane Leclerc (Tangente) March 20-23 Because Leclerc’s contortionism isn’t just a circus trick; it’s a philosophy that allows her to approach and explore space differently. http://dansedanse.ca/DDA_1314/en/ http://www.agoradanse.com/en http://tangente.qc.ca/ http://lachapelle.org/ http://www.usine-c.com/
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TtBernadette, photo by Ernest Potters Enchanted Room, by Kristel van Issum & Guilherme Miotto “I feel like my heart’s going to explode!” The trees are bare. This is not an enchanted forest, but a room and, really, the enchanted part of it probably only exists in the characters’ head. Like the trunks without leaves around them, their bodies are strong, but their heads are weak. Their bodies are a joke played on them, athletic, but useless. Their pirouettes look ridiculous given that they’re barely holding it together otherwise. They’re delusional and the room in question might very well be a psych ward. Performer Oona Doherty looks like she’s channeling Saturday Night Live’s Molly Shannon’s most neurotic characters: Mary Katherine Gallagher, Sally O’Malley, Anna Nicole Smith, Courtney Love… She takes on a sexualized persona the façade of which she cannot maintain because too fragile, and it crumbles around her. “There is so much beauty in this world! I can’t take it in!” They may be quoting American Beauty, but the result is ironic. They’re not upper-middle class. They can’t just quit their job, work in a fast-food joint, and still buy the car of their dreams. They’re taking the piss out of it. That kind of beauty is also a privilege, one they will never be able to experience. TtBernadette, by Kristel van Issum TtBernadette shares a lot of similarities with Enchanted Room. The choreography is messy. Joss Carter and Doherty jump around, fall down, and spin without grace. They mostly function independently, but when they touch it’s harsh. As in the former, there are also costume and wig changes, like they’re sporting different personas, but it’s only an illusion; they don’t ever really change. It’s disheartening, leaving them and us with little hope. There is no escape. The washing machine in the middle of the stage highlights the lack of domesticity rather than its presence. The only thing domestic about their relationship is the sadomasochism that permeates it. All this to say that T.r.a.s.h. are so hardcore that they’re not for the faint of heart. I’m kidding. They really aren’t. March 5-9 at 8pm Danse Danse / Cinquième Salle www.dansedanse.net / laplacedesarts.com 514.842.2112 / 1.866.842.2112 Tickets: 40,71$ Corps de Walk, photo by Erik Berg 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$-62,34$ 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. Oublions temporairement le 3, c’est le « third wheel, » et concentrons-nous plutôt sur le 2. C’est ce chiffre qui a marqué le passage de TAO Dance Theater à la Cinquième Salle de la Place des Arts. Deux duos, donc, et un solo coincé entre les deux, la cinquième roue du char.
Premier duo, extrait de Weight x 3, introduction du chorégraphe Tao Ye et de la danseuse, Wang Hao ou Lei Yan. Les deux interprètes apparaissent main dans la main, comme deux enfants qui refusent de se lâcher, sauf pour faire une pirouette ici et là, reprenant immédiatement la main de l’autre comme si c’était une question de vie ou de mort. Chorégraphie aux airs enfantins, donc, mais pour laquelle les danseurs refusent de laisser transparaitre le plaisir sur leurs visages. Leurs mouvements se font miroir ou sont synchros, surtout composés de ballotements de tête, les pieds transportant le corps de part et d’autre, les bras étant évidemment limités. Deuxième extrait de la même pièce, solo de Duan Ni, où la danseuse fait tourner un long bâton autour de son corps. Toujours la même réaction de ma part face à l’accessoire en danse : ce qui est intéressant de l’objet est la contrainte qu’il impose au corps en mouvement, mais il distrait du corps lui-même; je voudrais toujours revoir la même pièce sans l’accessoire. Sinon, ici, ça donne une performance plus appropriée pour une cérémonie d’ouverture aux Olympiques. Enough said. Au final, 2, une pièce qui, contrairement à ses interprètes (Tao Ye et Duan Ni ou Lei Yan), se tient debout. Les danseurs y apparaissent plutôt comme des corps-cadavres manipulés en mouvements isolés, parfois comme des marionnettes suspendus par des fils, abandonnés dans des positions plus inconfortables les unes que les autres. Enfin, une force motrice les habite, mais le corps conserve une fluidité qui les laisse cloués au sol. Ils demeurent accroupis et leurs têtes basses, parallèles au sol, se ballotent comme dans Weight x 3, suivant le mouvement des corps. Ceux-ci sont toujours en relation, souvent près l’un de l’autre, mais jamais en contact. Comme si l’invisibilité de leur visage – qui rappelle le solo If you couldn’t see me (1994) de Trisha Brown – n’était pas assez, les interprètes sont rendus encore plus anonymes. Leurs cranes sont rasés, grisâtres, effaçant les différences entre eux tout comme leurs costumes eux aussi gris, et ils sont souvent dos au public. Même lors que leur visage devient visible, ils se cachent derrière leurs paupières, presque toujours fermées. Ce sont ces contraintes, multiples mais cohérentes, qui élèvent 2 au-dessus des pièces qui la précèdent. www.dansedanse.net www.facebook.com/TAO.Dance.Theater www.youtube.com/user/TDT1026 José Navas traite ses danseurs comme s’ils étaient des ballerines. Tous ses danseurs. Bien que Navas ait toujours joué avec les genres, avec sa nouvelle pièce de groupe Diptych, c’est surtout sur les hommes que le jeu se remarque. C’est que le chorégraphe donne le même style de mouvement à tous ses danseurs, un style qui pourrait être décrit comme plus féminin de part ses similarités avec celui épousé par les ballerines. Un style fluide, léger, même délicat. À un certain moment, un homme et une femme soulève un de leurs confrères comme s’il était la prima ballerina. Même, vers la fin, un homme élevé sur le bout des orteils donne un coup de pied métaphorique dans la face de Nathalie Portman en se dandinant les bras comme si c’était lui le vrai black swan. C’est comme si Navas dépoussiérait enfin le ballet de ses conceptions antiques de genres. En même temps, il délaisse aussi la théâtralité de celui-ci et conserve plutôt la pureté qu’on lui connaît. En fait, la scénographie de Diptych rappelle beaucoup Hora d’Ohad Naharin (vu à Danse Danse plus tôt cette année), même si contrairement à Hora la danse ici n’est pas po-mo pour deux sous. Contrairement au ballet, toutefois, les bras se font ici très angulaires. Ils s’allongent jusqu’au bout des doigts, la paume ouverte et plate pour y éliminer toute rondeur. Cette dernière se trouve plutôt dans les tours exécutés dans les nombreux déplacements des dix danseurs. Comme pour refléter la musique de Bach, le mouvement est très bavard, même agaçant. Malgré la richesse du propos, c’est ce qui fait qu’au final, Dyptich est la pièce de groupe de Navas dont on se délaisse le plus facilement depuis un bout. Anecdote : à la sortie du spectacle, j’ai entendu un homme dire « s’habiller en femme, » comme si le sexe n’était qu’une question de vêtements! Comme quoi il y a encore beaucoup de travail à faire pour éclairer la question des genres; on peut donc remercier Navas de continuer la discussion. www.dansedanse.net www.flak.org Usually, I take notes during a performance to make it easier to write the review later. Last night though, at the premiere of Frédérick Gravel’s Usually Beauty Fails, I barely wrote anything. Instead, I kept thinking that I would simply recycle lines from reviews of previous Gravel shows I’d already written. However, now that I’m rereading those, it seems like a bad plan. It’s that, when I was first introduced to the work of Gravel over four years ago, I was still somewhat of a dance virgin, and most definitely a Gravel virgin. It was all new to me. On the other hand, I didn’t feel the need to take notes last night because I felt like I’d already seen it all before. And it’s about the only feeling I had. While Gravel’s choreography used to pack emotional punch, last night I felt nothing. I was ready to say that maybe it was official, that I was dead on the inside; but I was comforted by the fact that I just finished reading Jacques Poulin’s Le Vieux Chagrin this week and my heart can definitely still feel things. So, if I’m not dead on the inside, what changed? After the show, my date told me something to the effect that the show didn’t have as much impact on her as the choreographer’s GravelWorks (2008) had, maybe because the element of surprise was gone. Funnily enough, her statement echoed what little I had written in my notebook: “L’émotion est une surprise? Comment expliquer son retour? Ou, plutôt, l’émotion nous prend par surprise?” No matter how it works, the result here is: no surprise, no emotion. The one thing that was useful from a review of Tout se pète la gueule, chérie (2010) that I had written was this: “It is as if, in the absence of women, [Gravel] does not quite know how to make men dance together.” Now that women have been reintroduced into the mix, I realized that he doesn’t know how to make women dance together either. At a certain point in your life, you want to stop fucking virgins and hopefully have better sex. Usually Beauty Fails has yet to reach that point. P.S. While I was revising this text, I came across this quote by Lewis Mumford: “Because of their origin and purpose, the meanings of art are of a different order from the operational meanings of science and technics: they relate, not to external means and consequences, but to internal transformations, and unless it produce these internal transformations the work of art is either perfunctory or dead.” November 7-10 & 14-17 at 8pm Cinquième Salle www.dansedanse.net 514.842.2112 / 1.866.842.2112 Tickets: 36.10$ Benoît Lachambre’s Snakeskins: because you can only accuse Lachambre of being so hit-or-miss due to his uncompromising commitment to his artistic pursuits… and he’s due for a hit. (October 10-12, Usine C) Nicolas Cantin’s Grand singe: because nobody else manages to pack as much punch by doing so little. (October 30-November 1, Usine C) Brian Brooks’s Big City & Motor: because Brooks explores concepts that only push his choreography further into the physical world, turning the human body into little more than a machine. (November 22-25, Tangente) Karine Denault’s PLEASURE DOME: because we haven’t seen her work since 2007, when she presented the intimate Not I & Others using only half of the small Tangente space, dancing with humility, as though the line between performer and spectator simply hinged on a matter of perspective. (February 6-9, Agora de la danse) Pieter Ampe & Guilherme Garrido’s Still Standing You: because Ampe & Garrido have created one of the most compelling shows of the past few years, a dense study of masculinity and friendship covered with a thick layer of Jackass trash. (February 12-16, La Chapelle) Sharon Eyal & Gai Bachar’s Corps de Walk: because it’s the first time we get to see a work by Eyal in six years, when she blew us away with a non-stop human parade that was decidedly contemporary in its transnationalism and use of everyday movements like talking on cell phones. (February 28-March 2, Danse Danse) Mélanie Demers’s Goodbye: because, much like David Lynch did with Inland Empire, Demers demonstrated that an artist doesn’t need to instill suspension of disbelief in its audience to work, that dance can be powerful as dance just as film can be powerful as film. (March 20-22, Usine C) Maïgwenn Desbois’s Six pieds sur terre: because Desbois demonstrated that one doesn’t need to sacrifice art in order to make integrated dance. (March 21-24, Tangente) Yaëlle & Noémie Azoulay’s Haute Tension: because Yaëlle Azoulay came up with the most exclamative piece ever presented at the Biennales de Gigue Contemporaine. (March 28-30, Tangente) Dorian Nuskind-Oder’s Pale Water: because with simple means Nuskind-Oder manages to create everyday magic. (May 10-12, Tangente) Hora, c’est un titre un peu fourre-tout : ça pourrait tout autant référer à l’astrologie, une danse, une déesse, la prostitution, ou le temps. C’est donc un titre approprié pour la nouvelle pièce d’Ohad Naharin, dont la chorégraphie est elle aussi un peu fourre-tout, tout en évitant le côté péjoratif que le terme pourrait insinuer. On pourrait même parler de cadavre exquis synthétisé par le corps athlétique des onze danseurs. Alors, l’esthétique ne cesse de se balancer d’un bord et de l’autre de la ligne moderne/postmoderne. À l’art visuel moderne on emprunte le décor : des murs uniformes couleur vert lime pastellisée, longés en arrière-scène d’un long banc linéaire où les interprètes peuvent avoir un moment de répit. Côté danse, on recule même dans le temps jusqu’à retrouver les jambes musclées et entrecroisées du ballet, mais supportant un haut-de-corps qui préfère laisser pendre les pattes de devant tel un chien attendant un biscuit-récompense de son maître. De la danse postmoderne, donc, on emprunte un regard sans jugement sur le mouvement. Ceci permet à l’humour de certaines gestuelles d’émerger organiquement sans avoir à le trouver dans une théâtralisation facile. Similairement, des mouvements qui pourraient être perçus comme étant plus féminins ou masculins sont performés par tous les danseurs indépendamment de leur sexe, de sorte qu’ils s’en trouvent simultanément dé/genrés. Cette démocratisation du mouvement fait que la chorégraphie est toute en contraste. Souvent le mouvement n’est pas athlétique, même si les danseurs le sont clairement. Les gestes sont tantôt pausés/posés, tantôt suspendus dans la lenteur, tantôt caféinés. Les mouvements sont souvent répétés tels de petites phrases exclamatives. Par moments, c’est cacophonique, onze soli simultanés; le moment suivant, tout peut être synchronisé. La musique que vous vous imaginez pour supporter tout ça n’est sûrement pas la bonne. Naharin et le musicien Isao Tomita y vont d’un choix particulier et audacieux, des thèmes connus (Also Sprach Zarathustra, La chevauchée des Walkyries, Star Wars) réinterprétés sur synthétiseur. On croirait regarder un film de science-fiction des années 70 avec un petit budget, mais de grandes ambitions (qu’il réaliserait sûrement, d’ailleurs). Bref, le genre de film dont la qualité serait accentuée en fumant un peu. À la fin d’Hora, quand la scène est plongée dans la noirceur et que tout devient un peu flou, la comparaison est encore plus à propos. On se réveille dans un rêve filmique, comme Rosemary avançant lentement à travers le mystère de Rosemary’s Baby. Malgré son apparence fourre-tout, Hora est en fait la chorégraphie la mieux définie que j’aie eu la chance de voir depuis un bail. Une autre façon de dire que c’est pour l’instant le meilleur spectacle de danse présenté à Montréal en 2012. Hora 1-3 mars à 20h Théâtre Maisonneuve www.dansedanse.net 514.842.2112 / 1.866.842.2112 Billets à partir de 27.60$ Le chemin vertical, c’est évidemment celui qui mène aux cieux, à la mort. Pour vouloir renier que c’est plutôt dans le sol que le corps s’enfonce et se décompose, nos ancêtres ont créé une âme qui s’élèvait au delà de ce qui était inconnu pour eux, l'autre côté des nuages, pour rétablir la balance. C’est ce chemin que le chorégraphe anglais Akram Khan explore dans Vertical Road, un spectacle pour huit danseurs qui se transforment en une tribu ancestrale pour la cause. Ils sont vêtus de soutanes blanches et couverts de poudre, comme si on les avait trouvé dans le fond d’une pyramide sous une tonne de poussière. Leurs rituels religieux sont si accélérés qu’ils ont des apparences d’arts martiaux, leurs bras propulsés hors de leur centre de gravité, fouettant l’air et leurs soutanes au passage. Leurs bras s’étendent aussi vers le ciel, où leurs dieux se traduisent souvent en unique rayon de lumière. Il y a un certain abandon dans ce mouvement, du type qui engendre le soulagement. Presque tous les mouvements des danseurs sont synchronisés. Thématiquement, ça marche (la religion, comme le nationalisme, c’est l’effacement de l’individualité); toutefois, artistiquement, ça paraît de plus en plus comme de la paresse. Quand on ajoute à ça tous les clichés chorégraphiques qu’on trouve au long du spectacle (roulement au ralenti d’un couple au sol, une danseuse qui marche dans le vide lorsque soutenue par son partenaire, manipulation à distance de danseurs-marionettes par un de leurs confrères), ça commence à éroder le tout. Malgré l’athlétisme démontré par les danseurs, on ressent une retenue constante dans leur performance. Alors qu’ils devraient paraître en transe dans certaines sections, on peut plutôt remarquer qu’ils attendent tout simplement leur tour. Vertical Road, c’est de la danse tout ce qu’il y a de plus safe. On dirait que le spectacle a d’abord été soumis à un public uniquement composé de mamans, qui ont toutes donné leur approbation. En tant que divertissement, ça passe presque, mais on ne trouve absolument rien de marquant là (même pas un climax dans tout le spectacle). Khan aurait peut-être mieux fait de trouver la mort dans la noirceur du sol après tout, au risque de tomber sur quelques vers. Vertical Road 25-28 janvier à 20h Théâtre Maisonneuve – Place des Arts www.dansedanse.net / laplacedesarts.com 514.842.2112 Billets à partir de 27.60$ |
Sylvain Verstricht
has an MA in Film Studies and works in contemporary dance. His fiction has appeared in Headlight Anthology, Cactus Heart, and Birkensnake. s.verstricht [at] gmail [dot] com Categories
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