​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

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.
​
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.
​
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$

WARNING: spoilers.
​
La crème de la crème of Quebec celebrities (Sébastien Benoit) and their children (Sébastien Benoit’s child) were at the Bell Centre Wednesday for the first of a four-day run of Ice Age on Ice.

The show begins with a squirrel finding an acorn. He buries it in… something and a rocket goes off. Follows a parade of the main characters of Ice Age on Ice: a sloth, a male and a female mammoth, two possums, a cougar, and their monkey friends. Though the dialogue is in French, all the songs are in English, so they sing “It’s your birthday / Happy birthday!” to mister mammoth in a surreal scene, like if one witnessed the 1990 live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ice skating. (Did they do that yet?) The cougar’s back legs are paralyzed, but luckily they slide easily against the ice. The mammoths are also held up by wheelchairs, so it’s nice that there’s a positive message against ableism.

Comes the triggering factor: the aforementioned acorn stuffing caused a volcano to wake up and it’s threatening to wipe out our heroes’ party with its lava. The sloth recalls a legend about an icy berry that freezes everything it touches, which seems like a rather simplistic solution to global warming. This gets exemplified by a dozen abstracted glittery snowflakes with Mohawks and a bird who spin to show they’re happy about the cold, which lets us know they’re not from Quebec. As the show is aimed at children, it’s not surprising to notice some slapstick, like when the sloth tries to catch a snowflake with its tongue and falls down. Children love to see people fall. Adults do too, but only when it’s not on purpose.

So our heroes decide to go on a hunt for the icy berry in order to throw it in the volcano and freeze it over. The lady mammoth stays home though because that’s where women belong. There is also the inevitable complication in the shape of a female fox who wants the berry for herself because it would allow her to remain frozen in youth because women are vein and don’t care about being burned alive by lava just as long as they look good all the while.

Enters a squirrel who is also female, which we know because she is limp-wristed, waves her arms around a lot and wears makeup, as lady squirrels do. She’s an acorn-digger who needs a male squirrel so he can give her his nuts because she can’t get them herself. Her boobs get in the way. Except that mister squirrel realizes he lost his nut and has a psychotic breakdown in what is by far the highlight of the show. He hallucinates sixteen acorns dancing around him in what can be best described as a psychedelic drug trip.

Then there’s the Zamboni. No, wait… It’s just the mammoth’s big ass! I love fat jokes.

Anyway, they get the frozen berry, the fox tries to steal it but fails by losing it in a hockey match and apologizes for her behaviour. She’s surprised that our heroes would still want to hang out with her, which is understandable because what a sausage party!

But then it turns out that two possums ate the frozen berry. Why our heroes would leave the life-saving berry to animals who were clearly not aware of their plan is beyond me, but it doesn’t matter because it becomes obvious that the berry has no magical powers since the possums don’t turn to ice. Take that, magical-thinking solution to global warming!

That’s when mister mammoth has an idea: what if they caused a snow avalanche that would put out the volcano by jumping up and down? (Does this even make sense scientifically?) He asks his lady what she thinks and she replies that she believes in him because she’s a supportive woman with no opinion of her own. I’ll let you guess how it ends.

The show follows a simplistic structure: plot, figure skating, plot, figure skating, ad nauseam; like if Xavier Dolan was into the Ice Capades instead of slow motion. As with stories in contemporary dance, the two fail to connect in any meaningful way. All we perceive is the poverty of dance as a storytelling medium. Do we really need stories to make us swallow everything, including figure skating? There’s something almost patronizing about it, like Ice Age on Ice is just using characters kids already know and love to shove figure skating down their throat. As Spice World already pointed out back in 1997, it doesn’t matter what happens. Hell, nothing even needs to happen. All we need are those recognizable faces and we’ll eat it up.

Ice Age on Ice did give me a few ideas as to how contemporary dancers could make more money though:

1. Sell glow sticks to audience members.
2. Dance on skates. Even better, use hockey sticks and a puck as props.
3. Sell stuffed animals in their likeness.

August 24-27
www.evenko.ca
1.855.310.2525
Tickets: 29.25-100.50$

As Festival TransAmériques draws to an end, spectators gather to watch nineteen individuals most of whom have no formal dance training take over the large stage of Monument-National and perform in French choreographer Jérôme Bel’s Gala. Cast in Montreal, they represent the diversity of the city: different ethnicities, different ages, different genders, different abilities, different body types.

The show opens with a long, shitty PowerPoint of different empty stages around the world, from the ancient to the technologically advanced, from the modest to the luxurious, from the small to the large. But their essence is the same: on one side, a group of people is meant to perform and, on the other, another group is meant to watch. In that space and in that relation, something could happen. We could be in any of these theatres, but we are in this one. In any case, what matters is the performance.

The performance itself begins with a ballet section, a parade of the nineteen dancers performing a pirouette. First up is professional dancer Allison Burns so that the audience gets to see what the movement should actually look like as a reference point. The following non-dancers adapt the movement to their bodies, customize it for their skill level. While dancers can pick up a maximal set of cues because of their training, children and untrained adults only pick up the few that most characterize the movement for them. For example, a young boy simply lifts his arms over his head, actually holding hands, and spins. The exercise is then followed by a grande jeté.

However, what comes across is that it’s not just a matter of skill, but also a matter of comfort with one’s body. Some performers come across as uncomfortable, which stiffens their movement. This is especially important because I feel it plays a large part in the discomfort that many experience with contemporary dance, even as spectators since the audience is always projecting itself onto the dancers. This explains the issues that some have with nudity onstage. Most people couldn’t allow themselves to do what dancers do alone in their own home, let alone on a stage in front of hundreds.

This also partially explains why the children stand out in the improvised dance section. The cliché exists for a reason: they’re not as socially conditioned yet, they are less self-conscious, and they have fewer preconceived ideas about what dance is and what it’s supposed to look like, so their dance is freer. Édouard Lock said that the difference between dancers and non-dancers is in the legs. It’s visible here. Non-dancers make up for it by running around and moving their arms excessively.

Unable to hide behind their skills, the non-professional dancers’ personality shines through: there’s the ham, the shy one, the funny one… The bows section, also using the parade structure, punctuated with applause for every single performer, makes one feel like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day.

Bel deals with the shortcomings that ableism imposes on all of us by having different performers choreograph for the entire group, the way Maïgwenn Desbois had in Six pieds sur terre. Seemingly no one expected a fat man to come out twirling the baton while the others keep dropping theirs. Everyone has something to offer.

Despite its lazy structure, Gala is an undeniable crowd-pleaser. When the audience stood up for a warm standing ovation, it was the non-professional dancers they were applauding. It seems people like to see individuals who look like them onstage. Isn’t that surprising?

June 7 & 8 at 8pm
www.fta.ca
514.844.3822
Tickets: 34-50$

When the door opens, the action is already unfolding. On the other side of the door, the world is coated in a pinkish hue. A continuous loud high-pitched sound is oozing out. Through the spectators who have already found a seat, we see five dancers moving: Meryem Alaoui, Ellen Furey, Jolyane Langlois, Ann Trépanier, and Amanda Acorn, choreographer of multiform(s).

The audience is sitting on stands surrounding all four sides of the white stage, lending the performance the feel of a sporting event. Appropriately, the dancers are wearing sneakers. The rest of their outfits falls into a contemporary dance trend: nice bordering on fancy clothes that are joyfully mismatched.

Whenever spectators are allowed to sit on multiple sides of the stage, I am always surprised to notice that the feeling of the proscenium stage remains. It reminds me that, despite the conventions of theatre, dance is truly three-dimensional and that it is only ever possible to see from one’s own perspective.

Though the movement differs from one performer to another, it answers to the same constraints: their bodies are forever in motion and involved in repetitions. Back and forth, from one side to the other, like a pendulum. This swinging often leads the cylindrical body into rotations. They reminds us of mechanical toys that inevitably have a limited movement range, except that the dancers’ movement changes over time, ever so slightly, but undeniably. This rocking motion can at times induce motion sickness, an experience the spectators apparently share with the performers. It is an exercise of endurance for the dancers that is hypnotic for the audience.

The performers converge to the middle of the stage, their movement becoming synchronous and picking up speed. Synchronicity focuses the gaze; dissimilarity diffuses it. Synchronicity feels light. It’s like forgetting yourself. Yet when one of the dancers falls out of it, it’s her we’d rather be. She’s the one who looks free.

With its clear concept and perpetual motion, multiform(s) shares many similarities with Henderson/Castle: voyager by Ame Henderson. However, in voyager, dancers can’t repeat any movement so that the end result is less defined, more eclectic. In multiform(s), the repetitions appear to be an outlet, like in Julia Male’s solos. As in Guilherme Botelho’s Sideways Rain and the walking that takes up most of Olivier Dubois’s Tragédie, we also feel that this could go on forever, that in fact it has been.

Different images emerge depending on the body parts that the movement brings into action. Front to back movement looks like prayer; sometimes one might even say like divine possession. Lunges inevitably remind one of the repetitions involved in exercise. And, though the arms never carve the infinity sign in the air, it is seen everywhere. One is even inclined to believe that the dancers might be immortal.

June 5-7 at 9pm
www.fta.ca
514.844.3822
Tickets: 30$ / 30 ans et moins: 25$