​From the very first notes, a cinematic world imposes itself. It is an invisible orchestra that takes over the space, filling every corner of it with their bombastic score.

Nancy Leduc’s Une Femme Virgule Un Homme, which closed Tangente’s fall season this past weekend, borrows heavily from cinema. It is a solo for a woman in which Amélie Valois is cast as the sole protagonist of a film noir. Unfortunately, the worlds of dance and film clash incessantly.
 
The musical choices are largely to blame. While film scores are often already over-the-top, they are even more so when accompanying dance. They are meant to accompany car chases and explosions, too dramatic for body movement. It makes it seem that Valois should be performing circus acts, only there is no element of danger in her dance. At other times, it makes her look like she is performing burlesque without taking any of her clothes off. The gap between music and image is ever present.
 
The other gap that Leduc fails to fill is the one between her themes and movement vocabulary. Valois repeatedly stretches her legs and stands on the tip of her toes. How does it relate to the subject matter? Maybe it is meant to play with ideas of femininity, even though it is of a different style than that of film noir heroines. Still, as a result the choreography remains at the most elementary level, a display of abilities that has no other value. It’s all performed too earnestly to be parody.
 
Une Femme Virgule Un Homme plays like a Hollywood movie. It’s big, it’s crass, it lasts way longer than it should, and it leaves one completely indifferent.
 
Tangente
December 9-12, 2010

The selection of January as the month that marks the beginning of a new year is no doubt arbitrary, and yet it still affects the way we perceive things. For me, it means I've put out my list of the dance shows that stuck with me over the past twelve months and it's like the slate has been swiped clean. So when I begin to see shows again in January, I find myself impatiently waiting for the first great one. We've now crossed over into February and it's finally here: Annie Gagnon's La Marche Invisible.

Dance purists might struggle with her mixed-media endeavour, but those interested in art in all its shapes and forms are bound to be delighted. Gagnon conceived the show with Pascal Lareau, a multidisciplinary artist whose contribution to La Marche Invisible is imposing and fascinating sculptures that bring animals into a very human world. The two creators have surrounded themselves with top-notch collaborators. La Marche Invisible is one of those rare shows in which all elements work perfectly together. Composer and musician Antoine Berthiaume's live performance straddles that fine line between asserting itself without overpowering the dance, colouring it in all the right ways. Erwann Bernard's lighting design skillfully sculpts the space and gives each of the two sections its own distinct flavour. And dancer David Rancourt is, as always, outstanding.

In the first piece, "La Biche Lumineuse," the luminous doe is standing tall at the end of a red rectangle surrounded by crumpled newspaper. Gagnon and Rancourt enter the stage decisively. Their expression is cold; their movement, mechanical. We sense a solitude between these two figures, a solitude that, as opposed to loneliness, inhabits intervals rather than internal spaces. Each looks at the other as if trying to understand, without ever succeeding. The other appears as an overflow of emotion, incomprehensible. Even in the sexual encounter, the other remains just that: other. Yet in the final moments, despite their blank stares, it seems there might be something more than mere physical proximity. Their bodies are so close that they overlap, forcing their movement to mirror each other. They appear as two beings who, from a common desire, walk together in the same direction.

Rancourt introduces us to the second half, "Le Lapin Samouraï," by blindly and awkwardly mimicking the short but stout samurai rabbit at the back of the room. When Gagnon joins him onstage, he watches her fall repeatedly, more likely to pull away than to come to her rescue. His lack of action is less malicious than an apparent feeling of complete helplessness in the face of the world's destructive forces. Her body lying on the ground, he takes her hand as if it's the best one can hope for: to join oneself with a casualty of life or, more optimistically, with the other's vulnerability. More simply, it might just be what must be done, the duty of the samurai.

Despite what the title of each section might imply, more emotionality emanates from "La Lapin Samouraï." The dancers embrace and, on the other hand, shove each other. The contrast between the previous coldness and this sudden emergence of emotionality makes the latter appear cliché. So, for better or for worse, Rancourt loses his connection to Gagnon as his movement becomes robotic, a trauma caused by his inability to truly connect with the other.

Gagnon might be a young choreographer, but her work is mature and courageous. She is not afraid to be serious in her art. She is also unafraid of choreographic silences. She understands that they are just as much a material as sound, that one can sculpt with them, that they are necessary for rhythm. They also provide contrast and build anticipation for the next movement: when? what? where? By blending dance, sculpture and performance art, Gagnon and Lareau have crafted one of the best shows of the year.

La Marche Invisible
Tangente
February 4-7, 2010
Tickets: 17$ / Students: 14$
514.525.1500

No fanfare at Tangente this week. Fuck being submerged in a dark room, fuck seductive melodious music, fuck the ceremony that is usually the dance show. All that's left of it is for us to walk in the room and sit down in a chair, waiting for something to happen. The bright stage lights are already on and they won't go down before Dinozord (dancer Patrick Mbungu) walks over to centre stage from the audience. No big costume either: a grey t-shirt, exercise pants, and sneakers.

​Appropriate for the second week (of three) of Tangente's Idea-Based Dances program, inspired by two movements with similar roots. The first emerged during the 60s with the Judson Dance Theater in New York City, which marked the beginnings of post-modern dance. Their source of inspiration: conceptual art. The second arose in France in the mid-90s with a new generation of choreographers that abandoned movement to integrate other art forms into their practice, thereby creating "non-dance."

But Dinozord definitely dances in Ula Sickle's Solid Gold. In fact, he covers the entire spectrum of dance from the African diaspora from its roots to street dance styles performed in Congo today, passing through 20s Harlem, Broadway, the New York street dance scene of the 70s and 80s, and the more recent styles coming out of Los Angeles, like krump. All of this in 30 minutes.

What makes this dance history lesson that much more compelling however is Sickle's sound choice: no pop music. In fact, no music at all, in the strictest sense of the term. Again, very much in keeping with the practices of the Judson Dance Theater. Instead, what we get is the amplified sound from four microphones taped to the floor all around the stage, and (as we will discover later) one right underneath Dinozord's nostrils. His breath first sounds like a pen scribbling on a piece of paper. It is his, yet disembodied, marking the presence of two entities onstage: the physical and the electronic bodies.

We also hear his footsteps. Everything about Solid Gold highlights its own being. Like much of the work that emerged from Judson, it does not attempt to stand for something other than itself; it is what it is. As Dinozord's breathing becomes heavier as his body proportionally drips with sweat, it becomes clear that Solid Gold is about its own physicality rather than an attempt to seduce us with pleasing aesthetics. If the body is anything other than itself, it is (as many of the dances displayed here prove) a political tool.

There are a few moments that bring us in a surrealist realm rather than a hyperrealist one. The first is when Dinozord ceases to dance, yet the sound of his footsteps can still be heard over the speakers, creating a gap so wide between the physical and electronic bodies as to make the disembodiment complete. The second is caused by light in the only section not to use high-key lighting. Instead, Dinozord is backlit, the light drawing the contours of his undulating arms, which appear like waves.

The exercise is not without humour either, especially in the moments when the pop musicality of Dinozord's moves is only met by the amplified sound of his breath, or in his witty use of pauses. Not to mention the cheeky ending, where he removes his sweat-soaked t-shirt and all the technological devices that were weighing him down, and performs an abridged version of the show that lasts but a minute or two before looking at us as if to say, "Yeah, that's all I did. I don't know why that looked so hard." It raises important issues about duration, like what not everything is about content since the different experiences offered by each version are worlds apart. It's a stellar performance by Dinozord in a fascinating work.

Ula Sickle's Solid Gold is followed by Caroline Dubois's duo Ne pas se réduire à des expériences d'admiration, a more theatrical work that is difficult but rewarding.
 
Solid Gold
Ula Sickle
Ne pas se réduire à des expériences d’admiration
Caroline Dubois
March 4-7, 2010
Tangente
840 Cherrier, Sherbrooke metro
514.525.1500

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 undistinguishable shows, the letter A stands out, blood 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 moment, 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 daring 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 highly 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 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 am forced to admit that I am still haunted by its strangeness. In what is doubtlessly the best ambulatory dance 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.

SYLVAIN: One of the things that’s stood out for me about your work over the last few years is how political it’s been, and this even when I can’t quite pinpoint exactly how. Dance is not the most obvious medium to tackle political issues, yet you pull it off without being heavy-handed. How do you think dance can affect our political consciousness?
 
MÉLANIE: [… You] are so right when you say that dance in not necessarily the easiest medium to deal with political issues. However, it seems that my personal concerns and obsessions always refer to the politics of life. What is it to be human, to live in a group, to live in society, to dominate or to be dominated, to be the victim or the tormentor... How can we reconcile the best and the worst in us? My work always starts with one of these questions. Therefore, I imagine it is naturally transferred on stage. Although, I don't try to be political. I am less interested in the politics of politicians than in the politics of humans. I just think that art is political. Being on stage is a political act. A subversive act. A protestation act.  It is a poetic way of refusing the natural order of things. 
 
In this perspective, I choose dance as a weapon to defend the principles of freedom, transformation and elevation that can perhaps make us better humans. I try to use dance as a way to channel anger, rage, indignation, and eventually inspire a desire for change. Dance is for me a galvanizing whip.
 
Having the privilege of monopolizing people's attention for over an hour, I feel it is my job to put a magnifying glass on our shortcomings, our flaws, but also our desires and our needs. I am always trying to find the right way to measure, and the right dose to express human nature in all its beautiful and repulsive declinations. 
 
So, to the question how dance can affect our political consciousness, my humble answer is I don't know. I just think that dance operates at such a deep level that it can cross our intellectual resistance and work on our profound fibers. And perhaps, in the good days, affect our political consciousness by being more aware, more alive, more free.
 
Yeah, in the good days, dance is not only an aesthetic but a political and (if I may say) spiritual experience.
 
SYLVAIN: If I understand, you’re interested in how our personal politics affect our everyday life, the way we interact with and treat one another… Dance is a great way to physically exemplify that human interaction. How do these concerns show up in your new work Junkyard/Paradis?
 
MÉLANIE: For Junkyard/Paradis, I was interested in exploring the paradox of what I think constitutes the complexity of human condition, which is the fine line between the great survival instinct and simple self-destruction. As much as the body obeys the laws of nature and demands immediate satisfaction of our needs, the mind tries to rise above the fray to gain access to some sort of freedom. However, the modern Westerner having most of their primal needs easily satisfied can often fall into self-destructive habits. Perhaps as a way to still feel alive.
 
It has been a constant effort to play with the possible shifts in situation and to observe how much we desire the destruction of what we seem to adore the most. And this unfortunate equation can be applied to a social plan as much as to the most personal level. […]
 
We also spent some time questioning the perception of things. Not only what appears to be beautiful can easily be ugly, but how do we juggle with beauty and ugliness in the same moment, in the same image, in the same person?
 
If you live on Plateau-Mont-Royal, you probably know the long corridor at metro Sherbrooke that takes you right out on Sherbrooke Street. I walk there often to go to Circuit-Est and I experience the most intense Junkyard/Paradise moments when sophisticated classical music is being played to discourage homeless people and junkies to try to find refuge in the dark corners. I always struggle to keep my sanity when I walk the distance of this corridor. I tried to metaphorically put on stage this discomfort of having to deal with the great range of human potential. 
 
SYLVAIN: I’ve never walked through that corridor, but I’m familiar with the concept. If I’m not mistaken, they also play classical music in such areas because studies have shown that people are less likely to be violent when it’s playing. […]
 
You often use written text or spoken word in your work. What I love about the way you use text is that the statements you make are often paradoxical and even downright contradictory. It forces us as audience members to weigh each individual statement rather than accept or reject them altogether. For example, in a piece you created for Sonya & Yves, dancer Sonya Stefan says, "This is not a game. This is not reality. This is not art." We are left to ask ourselves what it is then, while questioning if we should believe any of her statements in the first place. Now that I think about it, this relates to what we were first discussing about the political nature of your work.  What is your approach to text? Is there any in Junkyard/Paradis?
 
MÉLANIE: […] I often use [words] to give another kind of perspective on a specific topic. […] While dance flirts with the right brain, words go usually straight to the left brain. I probably try to outmaneuver the obvious by attempting to make the movement talk and make the words dance. A little bit like how poetry works. 
 
There is quite a bit of text in Junkyard/Paradis and we play a lot on the paradox between what is said and the intentions in which it is delivered.
 
I like when words can offer a meaning and reveal a certain truth. Then I like when they make us doubt this truth and, ultimately, when we are forced to accept or, even better, discover another aspect of the reality that had escaped us in the first place.
 
But what I know for sure is that I like contradictions. Aren't we all creatures of contradictions?
 
Junkyard/Paradis
January 26-29, 2011
Agora de la danse
www.agoradanse.com
514.525.1500
Tickets: 20$/Students or under 30 years old: 14$

1. Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure) / Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (M2M), Trajal Harrell + Thibault Lac + Ondrej Vidlar (Festival TransAmériques)
American choreographer Trajal Harrell’s work has always been impressive if only for its sheer ambition (his Twenty Looks series currently comprises half a dozen shows), but Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure) is his masterpiece. In the most primal way, he proves that art isn’t a caprice but that it is a matter of survival. Harrell and dancers Thibault Lac and Ondrej Vidlar manifest this need by embodying it to the fullest. The most essential show of this or any other year.

2. ENTRE & La Loba (Danse-Cité) & INDEEP, Aurélie Pedron
Locally, it was the year of Aurélie Pedron. She kept presenting her resolutely intimate solo ENTRE, a piece for one spectator at a time who – eyes covered – experiences the dance by touching the performer’s body. In the spring, she offered a quiet yet surprisingly moving 10-hour performance in which ten blindfolded youths who struggled with addiction evolved in a closed room. In the fall, she made us discover new spaces by taking over Montreal’s old institute for the deaf and mute, filling its now vacant rooms with a dozen installations that ingeniously blurred the line between performance and the visual arts. Pedron has undeniably found her voice and is on a hot streak.

3. Co.Venture, Brooklyn Touring Outfit (Wildside Festival)
The most touching show I saw this year, a beautiful portrait of an intergenerational friendship and of the ways age restricts our movement and dance expands it.

4. Avant les gens mouraient (excerpt), Arthur Harel & (LA)HORDE (Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, Céline Signoret) (Festival TransAmériques)
wants&needs danse’s The Total Space Party allowed the students of L’École de danse contemporaine to revisit Avant les gens mouraient. It made me regret I hadn’t included it in my best of 2014 list, so I’m making up for it here. Maybe it gained in power by being performed in the middle of a crowd instead of on a stage. Either way, this exploration of Mainstream Hardcore remains the best theatrical transposition of a communal dance I’ve had the chance to see.

5. A Tribe Called Red @ Théâtre Corona (I Love Neon, evenko & Greenland Productions)
I’ve been conscious of the genocide inflicted upon the First Nations for some time, but it hit me like never before at A Tribe Called Red’s show. I realized that, as a 35 year-old Canadian, it was the first time I witnessed First Nations’ (not so) traditional dances live. This makes A Tribe Called Red’s shows all the more important.

6. Naked Ladies, Thea Fitz-James (Festival St-Ambroise Fringe)
Fitz-James gave an introductory lecture on naked ladies in art history while in the nude herself. Before doing so, she took the time to look each audience member in the eye. What followed was a clever, humorous, and touching interweaving of personal and art histories that exposed how nudity is used to conceal just as much as to reveal.

7. Max-Otto Fauteux’s scenography for La très excellente et lamentable tragédie de Roméo et Juliette (Usine C)
Choreographer Catherine Gaudet and director Jérémie Niel stretched the short duo they had created for a hotel room in La 2e Porte à Gauche’s 2050 Mansfield – Rendez-vous à l’hôtel into a full-length show. What was most impressive was scenographer Max-Otto Fauteux going above and beyond by recreating the hotel room in which the piece originally took place, right down to the functioning shower. The surreal experience of sitting within these four hyper-realistic walls made the performance itself barely matter.

C’est un spectacle.
​
I don’t know why anyone would expect anything else when going to Place des Arts to witness Nederlands Dans Theater passing through Montreal for the first time in over twenty years. For the occasion, we were treated to a Crystal Pite sandwich on Sol León & Paul Lightfoot bread.

Sehnsucht opens and ends with a man bowing in a frog-like position at the front of the stage. In the background, a straight couple engages in a pas de deux in a cubic room. Like the needles of a clock, their legs and arms stretch out and rotate around a two-dimensional axis. Their movement is fast-paced while that of the man in the foreground is fluid but sculptural in its slowness and poses, as though time passed more slowly for those alone. The room spins vertically, so that the dancers sometimes appear to defy gravity like Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding, sitting on a chair that hangs from a wall, for example. The choreographers use this magical element to charm the public without pushing it to the point where it would transcend its gimmick.

The room disappears and thirteen dancers come out for the middle section. They dance synchronously in a manner that is reminiscent of Ohad Naharin’s Hora: the athletic bodies of the dancer maintain the legs of ballet (pirouettes included); however, while the upper bodies in Hora could be said to fall under a post-modern aesthetic, here they are more akin to music video choreography. (The synchronicity might partially be to blame for this.) The fast pace of the choreography follows along the gaudiness of Beethoven’s Symphony Nr. 5, resulting in the kind of comic effect that the Looney Tunes capitalized on.

Canadian choreographer Pite offers the strongest piece of this triple bill with In the Event. Set against a grey sandy backdrop, eight dancers appear like a group on an expedition through the darkness of a foreign planet. The world around them feels potentially threatening, from their shadows moving along the walls of a cave to the rumbling on the soundtrack and the lightning that shatters the background. However, the dancers are in it together, cooperating as a group, sometimes literally forming a human chain with their limbs. The movement is elastic, round, and refreshingly ungendered. The dancers slide against the floor, sometimes even float above it. A solo provides the piece with a dramatic ending as a man’s hands frantically search the floor and reach for his chest and throat as if he were choking. For Pite, being alone looks like being lost.
​
León & Lightfoot fare better with Stop-Motion, a piece for seven dancers that is gothic-looking with its black background, white and beige pants, white walls, floor and powder, and black and white video projection. The dance is better served by Max Richter’s moody modern classical music. In solos and duos, the agility of the dancers is used to evoke emotion rather than being an end in and of itself like in Sehnsucht. However, the choreographers once again go for synchronicity for the group section; rather than intensifying the effect, it comes across as lazy and dilutes it. As the piece ends, some curtains are lowered while others after are lifted, and the lighting grid also comes down. There is the feeling that León & Lightfoot are doing this just because they can. With this triple bill, they show that they have the dancers and the means to make great art, but they fail to prove that they have the will.

November 1-5 at 8pm
www.dansedanse.ca
514.842.2112 / 1.866.842.2112
Tickets: 41.50-70$

Peter Trosztmer is both dancer and conductor in AQUA KHORIA, his collaboration with musician-digital artist Zack Zettle. Set within the dome of the SAT, Trosztmer evolves against a 360-degree animated projection that reacts to light and movement. In the middle of the floor: a small circular pond.
​
As we enter the room, we are surrounded by buoys, gently rocking their bells in the middle of the night. After the doors close behind the last spectator, Trosztmer whips the waters into a storm with his rain dance, looking like Mickey Mouse moving brooms about with his magic. The tumultuous waters swallow us into the calmness of its depth, pushes us back out, and ultimately pulls us back in. Follows an exploration of this underwater world, like an animated documentary without voice-over narration where experience is privileged over knowledge.

A drop of water falls into the pond. (How nice it would have been had it been mic’ed.) As the pond is lit, we perceive its reflection as light play on the dome, a sky made of water. Sometimes I find myself believing that through art we’re looking to capture something of nature that we’ve lost: the chaos and the beauty. It would explain why there’s so much art in the city and so little in the country.

Trosztmer approaches the water on all fours. When he finally dips his paws in, he stands but remains hunched over. We are simultaneously witnessing evolution and regression as a human being goes back to the water that we came from. The drop of water falls on him before turning into a stream in a quasi-Flashdance moment, as Trosztmer is now down to his underwear.

We reach a cave of moving shadows as Trosztmer walks around the space holding a candle, and travel through a tunnel without taking a single step. Trosztmer then goes back to playing conductor with his movement, which espouses the shape of the dome: height and circumference, what we are guessing are the two main ways of controlling the sound. The music is provided by harp-like-sounding notes from a synthesizer backed by a chill beat, which ends up sounding like Muzak for a spa.

We then find ourselves in what looks like lava inside a whale (or at least its bones), like Jonah. Soon, the whale is caught in a whirlpool and we are spat back out to the surface of the water, now calm again, as seagulls fly overhead. There is something of IMAX in the simplistic narrative followed here: exposition (calm waters), conflict (storm), journey (cave), climax (whirlpool), resolution (calm waters).

Of course, we’re more interested in the 360-degree projection than we are in the dance. Who could possibly compete with technology? There could be a ten-inch screen broadcasting hockey behind a dancer and we’d find ourselves watching the game. Some transitions could have been smoother as the music, projection and performance keep changing at the same time, but ultimately AQUA KHORIA does play like an IMAX movie: pleasant while it lasts but otherwise unmemorable.

October 11-21
www.tangente.qc.ca / www.danse-cite.org
514.844.2033
Tickets: 25$

A month ago, I wrote that I go see dance because I love when people shut the fuck up. Yet last night I was ready to completely backtrack on this statement. It just goes to show that, with art, there is never any definite set of criteria that one can judge a work by, that art is chemistry that produces as many reactions as there are elements and audience members.
​
The occasion was Belgium-based American choreographer Meg Stuart’s unmissable return to Usine C with her solo Hunter. Her father was a community theatre director, she will tell us. As a result, she witnessed a lot of bad acting as a child, so she swore she’d never speak onstage. And for the first hour of this 90-minute show, she doesn’t.

Treating her body as an archive of dance and memories, she moves in the style that has made her a contemporary dance icon. The collage aspect of the work is underlined incessantly, from the actual collage Stuart is making sitting at a table (and projected onto a screen at the back of the stage) at the beginning of the show to the sound collage by Vincent Malstaf and the video collage by Chris Kondek. I hear you loud and clear.

It might be this aspect that most deters from the work. Like the soundtrack that moves through sound clips as though someone were switching through radio dials and never settling on any one channel, Stuart never sticks with anything for long, making us feel like we’re looking at a dancer improvising in the studio as she maintains a steady pace that comes across as manic. We want to tell her to calm down, to stand still for a moment.

In her last show seen in Montreal, Built to Last, Stuart had touched on the ephemeral nature of dance by contextualizing it within a set that included a giant mobile of our solar system and mock-up of a T. rex skeleton. However, even though the set is also imposing in Hunter, it still replicates the blankness of the black box. In effect, it is like the table upon which Stuart does her collage: a rectangular blank surface on which beams are scattered around (like the pins used for her collage) from which rolls of fabric hang and are used as screens for the video projections. As a result, Stuart’s dance is decontextualized.

What a welcomed change it is when she finally speaks. She maintains the stream of consciousness trope used throughout the show, but we do want to hear what she has to say about her life, about art, about anything. She’s Meg Stuart. She can speak onstage as much as she wants and we’ll listen.

October 13-15 at 8pm
www.agoradanse.com / www.usine-c.com
514.521.4493
Tickets: 38$ / Students or 30 years old and under: 30$

Going to Festival Quartiers Danses’s Programme triple at Cinquième Salle on Saturday night was like traveling to the past without experiencing nostalgia. The evening opened with Diane Carrière’s reconstruction of ABREACTION (1974), titled Et après… le silence for this version. What first strikes us is how far music for dance has come over the past forty years. Here it almost sounds parodic in its likeness to the cheaply dramatic scores for low-budget straight-to-video productions. It is even more dated than the affected modern movement. Dancer Sébastien Provencher, always reliable, uses all of his length as he extends his arms as far as they will go. Nothing to do about it though: isolated screams are always funny, no matter what they’re supposed to communicate.
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Carrière joins Provencher for the second half of the piece. How satisfying it is to watch older people dance. It is unfortunate that Carrière was otherwise so precious with her material, refusing to shake off the music or the video footage that anchored Et après as a dusty historical document instead of truly resurrecting it to make it relevant for a contemporary audience.

Followed Victoria choreographer Jo Leslie with her duet Mutable Tongues. We’d already had the chance to see Leslie’s work at Tangente in 2011 with Affair of the Heart, an understated solo for Jacinte Giroux, a Montreal dancer whose speech and movement have been transformed by a stroke. Here again we found Giroux, this time accompanied by Louise Moyles, a dancer and storyteller from Newfoundland. Moyles walks into the room alternately speaking English and French. This self-translation makes everything she says sound phony. Giroux is lying face down on the stage, just outside the spotlight. She tells Moyles she’s had a stroke, but Moyles doesn’t listen, tells her to “get up” then to “lie down.” She is verbally abusive in a way that ableist culture is always abusive, even when it doesn’t use words, when instead of saying “get up” it just puts a staircase. We think of how choreographer Maïgwenn Desbois had subverted this idea by letting her neurodiverse dancers briefly choreograph her in Six pieds sur terre.

With its burnt orange dresses, black tights, and heavy reliance on theatre, Mutable Tongues also feels a bit dated, not to mention that it is even more didactic than Carrière’s piece (which used voice-over to bring up such topics as hand-to-hand combat and PTSD). It reminded me of Chanti Wadge’s The Perfect Human (No. 2), which found its inspiration in dancers answering the question “Why do you move?” A young woman had walked to the front of the stage and screamed “I move because I hate talking!” I would turn it around and say that I go see dance because I love when people shut the fuck up. That’s certainly when Mutable Tongues is at its best.

The evening concluded with Howard Richard’s Beaux moments, a piece for four women that was the most contemporary thing we got to see, though even then it was more akin to the beginnings of contemporary dance. There were moments that recalled Ginette Laurin’s work: the legs that were lifted while turning out at a 45-degree angle before the heels of the shoes thumped back down against the floor; the sideways lifts where a woman would throw herself under her partner’s arms so that she could lend on their thighs. However, Richard’s movement was less verbose and neurotic than Laurin’s. In the duets, the women also looked as if they were in each other’s way rather than working together. But even the electronic music and the costumes (black sleeveless dressed with red short-heeled shoes) had something of O Vertigo about them. There was also a solo set to Cat Power’s “The Greatest” that failed to fit with the rest of the piece as it flirted with the contemporary in a So You Think You Can Dance way.
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The most positive aspect of the triple bill was the chance to see middle-aged women dance, including Estelle Clareton. But, if we were to base an opinion on this evening alone, we would be inclined to say that we’d rather watch older people dance rather than choreograph. Maybe La 2e Porte à Gauche had the right idea with Pluton.

www.quartiersdanses.com
September 6-17
514.842.2112 / 1.866.842.2112
Tickets: 25$ / Students or 30 years old and under: 20$