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.

It’s not often we get to see intergenerational friendships dealt with such directness and subtlety as in Brooklyn Touring Outfit’s Co. Venture, presented at Centaur Theatre’s Wildside Festival. There is David Vaughan: 91 years old, British, dancer, singer, actor, choreographer, and archivist of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. And there is Pepper Fajans: 31 years old, American, designer, builder, performer, carpenter, and personal assistant to Merce Cunningham.

Neither of them appears onstage at first. It is rather a large wooden board that slides out from backstage, moving across the floor – part of the set, surely – but that then disappears through another door… before coming back onstage. As it slides away, it reveals Vaughan, sitting on a chair. When the board falls down, we think of the huge wall that comes tumbling down with a powerful gust of wind in Sasha Waltz’s Körper, though that’s not what happens here; the board turns out to be so light it barely makes a sound.

Vaughan speaks and we listen. That accent. That deep voice. When Fajans joins him onstage, they begin to reminisce about the past, about how they met working for Cunningham. We can see Fajans’s eyes looking inside his own head, trying to remember his lines (successfully). It’s endearing. It almost looks like he’s trying to remember the actual events. Plus it was the first show of the run; the text is bound to come back to him.

​Fajans periodically returns to the board. As he handles it, it inevitably shapes his body, flattening it, making it more angular, reminding us of Cunningham’s geometric choreography. Vaughan remains in his seat. “I can’t stand on one leg anymore,” he will later tell us. Co. Venture is also about dis/ability. Fajans sits next to his friend and together they dance with great economy, gently tapping their feet and waving their arms before them. It’s so small, yet there’s an undeniable magic. It’s amazing what can happen when you meet people on their own turf, like choreographer Maïgwenn Desbois does.

“Use your body,” Fajans says, as he dances vigorously. That sentence means different things to different people. There is an awkwardness to his own movement, like it’s too big for him; he always seems to be overreaching, jumping just a bit too far. We can see the struggle, the trembling, just as we did when the Cunningham Company last passed through Montreal at Festival TransAmériques in 2010. I’d never made a link between Cunningham and Daniel Léveillé, though now it seems obvious.

Fajans rests his arms on a lengthy stick, turning himself into a scarecrow-like cross. Then, it’s large skeletal puppets – flat heads resting on three long pieces of wood pivoting around the screws holding them together – that shape and replicate his body, awkward elongated limbs extending into space.

It’s hard to do a show like Co. Venture justice. It’s so simple, yet so charming and touching. Too rarely are dis/ability and intergenerational friendships explored in contemporary North America. After Cunningham had a stroke, he lost control of one of his arms. Still, he kept finding ways to move. “He found more and more ways to do less and less,” says Vaughan. It reconciles one with life and ageing.

January 7-16
www.centaurtheatre.com
514.288.3161
Tickets: 16$ / Students or under 30 years old: 13$

In this colourful dump, performers can disappear without leaving the stage or fall from considerable heights without hurting themselves. It is a post-apocalyptic world of overconsumption that lies before us and they are doomed to live in it. They may be able to choose from thousands of articles of clothing, but the choice is unappealing; it’s the only one they have. Their movement translates as play that spurs from idleness, which even comes across as the source of their masturbation and dry humping. They don’t even have the internet.

Every once in a while, unexpectedly, the performers cease their dicking around and break into beautiful song. In juxtaposing the music of Bach with a garbage dump, a thematic kinship emerges with Meg Stuart’s Built to Last (FTA, 2014): how is it possible that the species responsible for this post-apocalyptic mess also created such divine music? As the performers live out the last moments of life on earth in slow motion, we think there might be something redeeming about these creatures after all.

May 29-June 1
Monument-National – Salle Ludger-Duvernay
www.fta.qc.ca
514.844.3822
Tickets: 40-60$

Besides the two musicians, five performers occupy the stage with about just as many dummies. The action is so minimal that the difference between the two isn’t always obvious. The mannequins look like toys that are being neglected while a child is busy playing with as many live performers (no more than two seem to be moving at the same time) as his hands can hold. The result is intensely photographic, so it’s not surprising that I caught a few audience members taking pictures with their smartphones. The anemic narrative plays like what’s left of a memory that’s been repressed.

Not since the book of poetry I wrote during my teenage years (titled Love and Other Violent Things, thank you very much) have so few words been used to communicate so much angst. Example of dialogue:

Jonathan  I’m the coldest piece of shit in human history but your rotting, stinking corpse is so hot in theory I think it’ll melt me.

Ghost  I’ve tried to kill myself so many times since I met you that every time you hit me it’s like the ten thousandth car running over a dead dog.

Sometimes the dialogue is less eloquent: “–Hey. –What. –This is how it’s going to happen. –What’s up. –Not much. I’m fucked up. –You into this?” Later: “–I don’t care. –You’re… It’s confusing me. –Jonathan. –What?”

One of the things it does get right is the contemporary disillusionment and malaise with boredom: “I’m boring. You’re boring. Sex is boring. Being tortured is boring. Being killed is boring.”

There is something potentially admirable about the fact that writer Dennis Cooper, far from being a teenager, is able to write as though he were one, without any perceivable distance or irony creeping in.

While I was watching Kindertotenlieder, I experienced a similar feeling as I had a few nights before while at the Ben Frost concert. It felt like something magical was about to happen, but in the end not much did. (Frost cancelled the concert because he was “not willing to give [us] a half-assed show on a half-assed PA.”) It was like the earplugs that were given to us before the show and which turned out to be barely necessary: somewhat of a fake-out.

As the show progressed, I saw no reason for the audience not to be onstage rather than simply watching the performance from afar. It’s all it might have taken to make it one of the most memorable experiences of the year.

www.usine-c.com
www.g-v.fr

C’est ainsi qu’un écran situé au milieu d’un mur, sur lequel est projetée une vidéo de feux solaires, se transforme en fenêtre alors que des techniciens plient le mur en deux pour créer un coin de chambre d’enfant. C’est d’abord de sa propre voix que Brassard nous livre le texte, faisant fi du genre des personnages ou de leur âge. Toutefois, les couleurs de ses vêtements et de ceux du gamin sont similairement sombres, noir ou marin, nous donnant l’impression que cette voix pourrait passer d’un corps à l’autre, de la femme au garçon à la femme à l’homme. Lorsque le timbre de sa voix est modifié (comme Brassard aime bien le faire) pour lui donner une voix masculine, sa propre voix persiste en soupirs et chuchotements sous celle des haut-parleurs.

À travers l’imagination de cet enfant d’architecte, Vauban démontre que, lorsque le littéral est défendu, le symbolique vient à la rescousse et prend sa place. Le garçon construit des structures à partir de blocs, une ville de son propre cru où il pourrait bouger comme bon lui semble. Alors qu’il sommeille dans son lit, Brassard passe un large balai muni de petites lumières qui projettent l’ombre de cette ville imaginée sur les murs de la chambre. La pièce prend place dans une nuit perpétuelle, une nuit qui fait appel aux rêves, espace de toutes les libertés. La nuit qui permet aussi – à l’encontre du jour qui accentue la visibilité – un peu plus de liberté à ceux qui demeurent éveillés, leurs corps dissimulés dans la pénombre. Évidemment, cette nuit symbolise l’aveuglement grandissant du garçon.

La nécessité d’une liberté de mouvement, quelle qu’elle soit, se voit dans les paroles du personnage qui dit, « Je ne bougeais plus que dans ma parole. Je parlais car je ne voyais pas. » Alors qu’il réussit à naviguer les labyrinthes de son père à l’aide des plans que ses migraines lui imprègnent dans l’œil, sa nouvelle liberté de mouvement efface l’importance du symbolique : « Toute parole me paraissait désormais veine. »

Malgré son sujet contre-utopique, Vauban est d’une belle simplicité, un petit trente minutes aussi doux que les rêves dans lesquels il baigne. À cet effet, la musique ambiante de Tim Hecker (Ravedeath, 1972) est judicieusement utilisée pour colorer le récit, planant entre l’inquiétude du réel et la beauté de l'imaginaire.

21 & 22 octobre à 20h30
Usine C
www.usine-c.com
514.521.4493
Billets : 10$

Germinal d’Antoine Defoort et Halory Goerger, c’est du théâtre qui ne prend rien pour acquis, incluant le théâtre. C’est donc une genèse de la scène qui débute dans le noir et qui, comme l’autre genèse, doit d’abord faire appel à la lumière pour révéler ce monde. Outre les parallèles avec le récit biblique de la création, Germinal joue avec l’histoire de l’humanité. C’est donc ainsi que le mot écrit, projeté sur le mur du fond, précède inexplicablement la parole.

Les quatre interprètes en viennent à se servir des surtitres pour dresser une liste de leurs découvertes scéniques et des concepts qui en découlent. C’est la boîte de Pandore qui s’ouvre et les concepts s’enchaînent et se multiplient jusqu’à ce qu’on n’arrive plus à y voir clair. C’est alors que les interprètes ont cette autre idée très humaine, celle de créer des catégories pour démêler tout ça. Influencés par les éléments limités à leur disposition et la découverte d’un micro sous la scène, ils décident de diviser les éléments entre ceux qui font « pocpoc » au contact avec le micro et ceux qui ne font « pas pocpoc. » Émergent alors l’absurdité de l’aspect arbitraire de la catégorisation, l’ironie qui en ressort lorsqu’on découvre que l’idée du pocpoc ne fait pas pocpoc, et la métaphore alors qu’on se rend compte que quelque chose peut faire « pocpoc dans le cœur. »

En répartissant leur énumération sur une ligne chronologique, ils en viennent au moment présent, au-delà duquel l’inconnu règne. Toutefois, ils entrevoient le mot « fin » avant de rapidement rebrousser chemin. Évidemment, il est question de la fin de la pièce, mais aussi celle de la vie. Les interprètes passent donc à travers les étapes du deuil avant que Beatriz Setien, en mode acceptation/reconstruction, déclare « Je propose qu’on fasse un truc bien. » C’est alors qu’ils créent une chanson à partir de la liste de mots qu’ils ont débité tout au long du spectacle. Encore une fois – je pense à Built to Last de Meg Stuart, vu le soir précédent, et Tragédie d’Olivier Dubois – l’art est présenté comme étant la réponse appropriée face à la mortalité, la seule rédemption possible. Alors que les mots s’accumulent, on peut penser au livre-poème Alphabet d’Inger Christensen, ode à l’abondance de la vie. En passant de rien à tout, Germinal peut aussi nous rappeler le film Nothing du Canadien Vincenzo Natali, si on le faisait jouer en sens inverse.

Germinal baigne dans l’humour. Les blagues sont souvent évidentes et étirées au-delà de leur élasticité. C’est un spectacle qui se veut plaisant et séducteur; et, soir de première montréalaise, il a visiblement plu à un public séduit. Personnellement, ça m’a fait apprécier de plus belle Built to Last, moins racoleur, plus admirable.

29 & 30 mai à 20h / 31 mai & 1er juin à 16h
Maison Théâtre
www.fta.qc.ca
514.844.3822 / 514.842.2112
Billets : 43$ / 30 ans et moins ou 65 ans et plus : 38$