Local Gestures
because the personal is cultural
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$
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Yes, Gladyszewski does invoke magic by concealing bodies in darkness, like when Martin Bélanger’s arms appear out of nothingness from behind a strip of light and float in the air. The image recalls Brice Leroux’s Quantum-Quintet (FTA, 2007) and Cindy Van Acker’s Obtus (FTA, 2011). Half-seen, the movement becomes inexplicable. Lights in the sky are a familiar sight; it’s only when they move in unexpected ways that we suspect alien life. It’s for this reason that I’m less convinced by the voice work of the performers, decidedly too human.
For the most part, however, Gladyszewski uses technology to reveal what is always there but which usually goes unseen. Such is the case with cameras that reveal the heat patterns of the human body and of the liquids it comes in contact with. Suddenly, it’s like we’ve entered a psychedelic world where the human body is turned inside out, a world of tie-dye souls and auras as moving skins. The body becomes as malleable as playdough, liquefies before our very eyes. We are witness to the com/motion of the dis/embodied internal. Our bodies are haunted by spirits whose life force is muffled by their shells. It’s otherworldly, yet the internal landscape laid before us is so recognizable that I was tempted to scream, “This is the real world! The world where our bodies appear to be solid is obviously a lie!” And I was completely sober. That’s why you should see Phos. May 28-31 Place des Arts – Studio O Vertigo www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 Tickets: 29$ / 30 years old and under: 23$ First off, let me say that I’ve only been following choreographer Daniel Léveillé’s work since 2006. I’m mentioning this because, though Léveillé’s style remains just as recognizable in Solitudes duo, there are also some noticeable departures, at least to those of us who’ve only been following him for the past decade. Like Mathieu Campeau and Justin Gionet drawing circles with their hips in the first duet, which comes across as downright flirtatious. Léveillé’s choreography looks a little less cold and mechanical, a bit more theatrical.
When Ellen Furey looks up to the ceiling, her eyes are so expressive as to look frightened. For a moment, her interaction with Gionet is even messy; not as a result of the effort required, as is usually the case in Léveillé’s work, but in its very performance. One could blame the music – which so easily colours our perception of the dance – for these changes. Léveillé predictably goes for Bach and Royer, but surprisingly slips in some classic rock (The Doors and The Beatles). It’s not just the music though. The dance is more languorous. While there must have been duos in Léveillé’s group works, I don’t recall anything ever looking this… coupley. Brianna Lombardo and Emmanuel Proulx hold hands and use all of the resulting arms’ length as tape to wrap around their partner. Since Léveillé’s movement seems based on an aesthetic rather than on its effect, there’s usually some incidental humour that slips into the choreography. Not so here. We have to wait until the last duet with Campeau and Esther Gaudette to find some humour and it’s calculatedly funny. For starters, the dance is set to The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” Given how much Léveillé capitalizes on lifts and gravity, that choice can only be qualified as a joke. As if that weren’t enough, the dancers headbang, make the devil sign, and thrust their hips. How ironic that the more Léveillé’s dancers have clothes on, the more sexual they act. Sometimes, it looks like it could have been choreographed by Virginie Brunelle. Solitudes duo is, like all of Léveillé’s work, a dance of every moment; there is no climax. Yet, when it ends, it still manages to feel a bit too short. May 26-28 at 9pm Agora de la danse www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 Tickets: 45$ / 30 years old and under: 38$
Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides is that mirror in Archive, a demanding but necessary performance presented by Festival TransAmériques. Zaides took a series of video images from B’tselem, an Israeli center for human rights in the occupied territories, only selecting excerpts featuring Israeli men, no doubt to avoid speaking for or against the Other.
Zaides pauses the video, espouses the position of one of its protagonists, spins it 180 degrees, mirrors it, flips it by 90 degrees, leaning against the floor to give us the view of the top of his head, like the one the camera gives us by hovering above the protagonist. Archive is challenging because of its subject matter and its clinical approach, the live dance performance being overshadowed by the video images. When it does work, it’s because of the confrontational attitude that necessarily emerges given the source material, as Zaides walks towards us with aggression in his eyes (the audience is visible throughout the show as the house lights, though dim, remain on) before switching to the movement of a man waving his arms around to try to scare sheep away. Before us, humans become animals that need to be displaced. Zaides often returns to this movement. Archive is at its most powerful near the end, when Zaides replicates the vocalizations of the men in the videos into a microphone, looping them, building a soundtrack that is increasingly oppressive and violent. It’s hard to bear even for a few minutes. Imagine for hours, for weeks, for years… May 24-26 at 7pm Place des Arts – Cinquième Salle www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 Tickets: 39$ / 30 years old and under: 33$
Things could have gone down a more simplistic road as, at first, Gutierrez and his partner Mickey Mahar (a sprite-like cross between Sufjan Stevens and Pee-wee Herman) dance synchronously non-stop as percussive music is blasting over the speakers, barely taking a break as Mahar slips a “2, 3, 4” in before launching into yet another dance sequence. However, it’s when they finally stop that the show ironically progresses. The music keeps going, just as loud, but they stand still – much needed rest – holding hands.
When I was young, I used to believe that two people of the same sex holding hands was a political gesture. Then, when I had my first boyfriend, I realized that it wasn’t political but merely natural, that it happens without thinking or even realizing you’re doing it, that your hand searches for the one you love. What I’m saying is, people holding hands are fucking beautiful and Guttierez and Mahar are fucking beautiful. Slowly, their heads turn towards each other and they kiss. So we guess, anyway, since one of them has his back to us, so that they could be pulling a Will Smith in Six Degrees of Separation (but we can safely assume they’re not). And the dance starts up again, in a way that could remind one of the choreography for countless female pop singers. The movements are not difficult to execute, but they become more impressive as they accumulate, playing like a physical version of a memory game. The clarity of and work behind the movement is retroactively highlighted as the dancers switch to a different mode of performance, one that reeks of drunk clumsiness. They display the kind of behaviour where, in the moment, one might be blissfully unaware (humping a speaker, for example); it’s only once you sober up that it’s going to be embarrassing. They also fight in a way that’s more meant to annoy the other person than actually hurt them. In the spoken section, they impressively maintain their synchronicity even as they vary their speech in most comical ways. Particularly delightful is when they say, “We are the faceless, voiceless dancers. Do you want to fuck us?” Unfortunately, Age & Beauty Part 1 ends with its weakest section. Though it decidedly brings us in a different direction, Guttierez’s breaking into song doesn’t fit with the rest of the work. Instead, it feels like a performer’s fantasy, one that has the added drawback of putting Mahar in the background, where he doesn’t belong. Still, Guttierez remains a refreshing voice in queer performance and dance at large. May 23-25 Théâtre Prospero www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 Tickets: 34$ / 30 years old and under: 28$ Le 14 avril, la contorsionniste Andréane Leclerc présente Mange-moi, l'une des pièces phares de 2014, au Festival Vue sur la relève. Voici une entrevue téléphonique réalisée avec l'artiste.
This week, Sasha Kleinplatz is presenting L’ÉCHAUFFEMENT, a show she choreographed for the students of l’Université du Québec à Montréal. I met with her at Café Olimpico in Mile-End to ask her a few questions.
SYLVAIN VERSTRICHT What’s the difference between choreographing for professional and student dancers? SASHA KLEINPLATZ It’s totally different. It’s crazy, crazy different. It’s definitely made me reflect on what I am imparting to interpreters or dancers in general, and it’s actually helped clarify what I’m doing when I’m choreographing work because I’ve realized that a lot of what I’m doing when I’m working with students – because it’s the second time now, I did LADMMI [L’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal] last year and UQAM this year – is communicating to them what’s important to me about performance, about the architecture of movement and space, and in terms of the relation among themselves and then their relationship to the audience and the one that I’m interested in constructing between me and them. I think I’m always doing that with dancers, but it’s really forced me to reflect this time, “What am I doing?” It’s a really incredible opportunity to be forced to think about that so much more clearly. VERSTRICHT Is it because they’re younger, like you’re influencing the youth? “Think of the children!” KLEINPLATZ I feel like I have to be careful… I really have to be, “What is it that I’m trying to say to them?” I feel like there’s less space to make mistakes, not in terms of the choreography that’s being made… They’re in these very formative years and I want them to feel supported and challenged and heard, so I feel somewhat protective of them; not protective like I’m going to say something bad and hurt their feelings, but this is a really special time in their lives and I want to be part of making that time good and not shitty, you know? (She laughs.) I don’t want them to look back on it and think, “That sucked and I didn’t learn anything!” So I’m thinking a lot about pedagogy and choreography at the same time. VERSTRICHT Even though you haven’t used the word, I feel you’re talking about ethics… KLEINPLATZ Yes. VERSTRICHT Since you brought it up, because you did choreograph for L’École de danse contemporaine last year and you were a Concordia student, have you noticed differences between the schools? KLEINPLATZ Definitely. There are huge differences. Concordia I haven’t taught at but, just in terms of my own experience, I was so unknowledgeable about the Quebec dance scene when I was in that program. I don’t know if it’s still that way. I mean, I knew nothing. And then you go to LADMMI or UQAM and I can say to them, “What are the choreographers that you consider in Quebec?” and they just are spouting off fifteen, twenty names without a thought, you know, and when I was at Concordia I had no idea. I knew who Jean-Pierre Perreault was and who Marie Chouinard was, and that was it. And, eventually, I knew who Ginette Laurin was. So their knowledge around the history of dance in Quebec, but then also their knowledge based around the pedagogy of movement are completely different. Concordia is really based on this idea that you’re making your own way in terms of developing your individual voice as a choreographer. They choose not to have students learn repertoire, which can be cool for maintaining this feeling of carving out a unique path. LADMMI is very much about technique, and there’s a sort of idea about what it means, like somatic practices are really important. They’re the same at UQAM. And also understanding anatomy in this really applied way on a moment-to-moment basis, when you’re doing choreography, technique classes, Pilates… I’m their Pilates teacher at LADMMI as well, so I’m getting a different window… And then at UQAM, I feel it’s this mix of the technique and then a sense of Quebec as a historical place in dance. So, very different. And then I don’t think any are better or worse, but just completely different. VERSTRICHT I feel like each has their strengths and weaknesses. As a spectator, I also feel that the student bodies are quite different. One of the strengths of UQAM, I find, is that there’s a wider diversity of body types. I was wondering as well, because often – probably UQAM the most – the disparity between men and women… You’re working with fifteen students this year and there’s one man. Does that affect in any way what you do when it comes to the show? KLEINPLATZ With this piece I made a really conscious decision from the beginning that I wanted it to affect nothing. But it was funny because [fellow choreographer] Andrew Tay came to rehearsal this week and he was just, like, “Well, it says something, even if you don’t want it to say anything. It reads a certain way. I don’t know exactly what the reading is, but it’s glaringly obvious that there’s only one man.” Right? And I chose to not deal with that in any way, shape, or form. That’s my way of dealing with it, is to act as though they’re all the same. I was saying to Andrew, “I know, it’s shitty because I just don’t want it to read as anything. I don’t want anybody to read anything into it.” And he said, “Yeah… There’s nothing you can do about it.” But, I mean, I love the one male dancer, I love Alexis [Trépanier]! (She laughs.) I don’t want him to feel like I don’t love having him there. But it’s weird to realize that there are readings of work that – of course, we know that – are completely outside your control, you know? VERSTRICHT It just reminds me of, once, I went to an UQAM show where there were only women [performers] with a friend of mine who’s an intelligent guy and after, he was, like, “Oh… Clearly that was about lesbian squirrels.” And I was, like, “Really? You think the piece we just saw—” KLEINPLATZ (Laughing.) Whose piece was it? VERSTRICHT That was years ago… It was [Sarah-Ève Grant-Lefebvre’s Une Poutre dans l’oeil or Marie-Joëlle Hadd’s C12H22O11]. KLEINPLATZ Oh, was it a student choreography? VERSTRICHT Yeah, it was a student thing. KLEINPLATZ I thought you were going to be, like, “It was this invited choreographer and he thought it was lesbian squirrels.” That’s incredible. “It was Ginette Laurin!” VERSTRICHT But I was wondering, “Where did he take that from?” The squirrel thing, it would be because they would be down on the floor, knocking [it with their fist]. But the lesbian thing… I guess it was just because they were all women. KLEINPLATZ Yeah. It’s weird to realize that… Showing work throughout Quebec this winter, more and more with choreography, I realize you have no control over the reading of work. Not in a bad way… You just have to not be invested in how people are reading work. For me, it’s more and more interesting that they’re having a self-reflexive experience or some kind of experience. Even if it’s like they’re contesting something, that’s fine. VERSTRICHT The show is called L’ÉCHAUFEMENT [THE WARM-UP]. How does that relate to what we’re actually going to see dance-wise? KLEINPLATZ I started off, in the process of [my previous show] Chorus II, realizing that what I really loved about the piece was the warm-up [the dancers] did to get ready for the piece, so I had Nate [Nathan Yaffe] and Milan [Panet-Gigon] come in and teach the students at UQAM the warm-up. But I also realized it wasn’t just the physical movement of the warm-up that was interesting to me, but just the way the men from Chorus II were relating to each other in the warm-up, so I just started talking to the students about that, about when we’re in a warm-up state and everything, we communicate with each other differently than we would in a performance in front of an audience; and, from the first class, talking about – even though it’s a total impossibility – is there some way for us to retain the warm-up state during the performance? So that’s what we’re trying to do. VERSTRICHT In the trailer that I saw, there’s a little disco ball involved. Are you also influenced by nightlife or club culture? KLEINPLATZ No, I’m really not, but even the lighting designer was like, “Yeah, it really looks like a rave.” I was just interested in the disco ball and light reflection. (She laughs.) That’s all it was! It has a nostalgic feeling. You have so many different associations with light from a disco ball. I just like that effect. But I get that it reads as club culture, so I’m okay with that, but it’s not what I was thinking about. (I stop the recording and we talk off the record, but then I find myself really interested in what Sasha has to say and I ask her if I can start recording again.) KLEINPLATZ So [L’ÉCHAUFFEMENT] is an hour of running and, when I was working at L’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal, I had wanted to do something minimalist, my intuition was to do something minimalist, but then I sort of felt guilty about doing something minimalist because I felt like I wouldn’t be giving the students enough material to dig into and to experience. And I was happy with the piece, but what I didn’t like is that I was sort of saying there’s a difference between choreographing for students and choreographing for professional dancers and I have to alter my process. And this time I was really, “You know what? Whatever my intuition says and wherever my interest is lying, I’m just going to pursue that and trust that somehow the confluence of my interest and where the students take my interest is going to be enough nourishment for them to feel like they’re really getting something from this process." So this time I just really stuck to, “Okay, what I’m really interested in is running and exhaustion and being together and how we’re going to be together.” A lot of the piece is just negotiating how we’re going to be together right now and that’s super exciting to me. So I was like, “I’m just going to stick to that and be okay with it.” It’s been hard because there’s been this feeling that their parents are going to come to this show and be like, “What is this? (We both laugh.) I’m paying for you to do this? This isn’t dance!” I’m like, “You know what? This is exciting to me, so…” And UQAM trusted me, so I hope they’re happy, but I think it was a rewarding process for everyone involved, so whether or not it functions as a university end-of-year show, I’m a little less concerned with. I want the dancers to have an experience and to be challenged. I think they are, so… VERSTRICHT Another thing that’s often different between professional and student shows is the number of performers. It’s not every day you get to work with fifteen performers. I was wondering, is it a chance for you to take the kind of work you already do and make it for fifteen people or does the fact that you have such a high number of performers, you have to go somewhere else, go in another direction completely? KLEINPLATZ Not at all, just because before I was actually working with grants… The second and third Piss in the Pool [a dance event organized by Kleinplatz and Tay that takes place in an empty pool], on one piece I worked with sixteen dancers and another one I worked with twelve. I mean, they were all volunteers, but I’ve already been interested in this sort of numbers game in choreography for a long time, so it doesn’t feel uncomfortable at all. It feels really natural. What is interesting is, UQAM, it is a wide variety of dance ability; what some dancers are stronger at is different than others. So trying to honour the best of everybody in the work was a good challenge. It’s like, how do I make things work so that all these people have all these different abilities and specialties? Like, I have a Latin dance champion (she laughs) in the piece and so, at a certain point, I was just, “Right now, right here, at this point in the piece, I want you to do Latin dance and just hit it! I want you to hit it hard, I want you to do exactly what you would do in a competition.” And that feels wonderful to be “How do I really honour what these people feel excited about in their lives as dancers?” So that’s special to be able to do that, you know? I think it is… CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO TRAILER FOR L'ÉCHAUFFEMENT April 8-11 at 8pm Agora de la danse www.danse.uqam.ca 514.525.1500 Tickets : 12$ Je m'entretiens avec le danseur Marc Boivin, lauréat du prix Dora Mavor Moore pour sa performance dans WOULD de la chorégraphe Mélanie Demers. Le spectacle sera présenté cette semaine à l'Usine C.
Audience members gradually regain their seats. Those who remain onstage break up the blankness of the theatre cube, like plants scattered across the space. At the back of the room, video is sporadically projected on a wall made of plywood that’s been painted grey, giving the images an enticing texture.
The dancers’ eyes are often covered, blindness further conveying their isolation. It is more compelling to watch them blindly looking for one another than to watch them execute choreography. With the idleness of confinement also comes play. Performers stand at the back wall before moving through the space to the sound of one of theirs counting. A man attempts to solve a Rubik’s Cube. They run after one another like children in what must feel, if only for a fleeting moment, like freedom. Much like prison, the experience seems more intense for those on the inside than for those of us on the outside. The only moment – too short – that builds up to any kind of intensity as an audience member is when Eduardo Rocha caresses Cristóbal Barreto Heredia’s body while repeatedly asking “T’aimes jouer?” Many of the actions described here can also be seen on the video, which jumps through time and space, like a memory or a dream. The digital duplication makes it seem as though the artists didn’t trust the power of the live performance. As if to confirm this, the show ends with the video rather than with our prisoners. April 8-11 Théâtre Espace Go www.danse-cite.org 514.845.4890 Tickets: 35$ / Students or 30 years old and less: 27$ 25-27 mars à 20h
Usine C www.usine-c.com 514.521.4493 Billets : 32$ / Étudiants ou 30 ans et moins : 24$ |
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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