Dance Roads Cross the Atlantic

Deborah Light’s Angelica, photo by John Collingswood

After traveling through Great Britain, Italy, and Luxembourg, the Dance Roads tour finally arrived to its final destination in Canada this past weekend. It is not uncommon for big companies to get to show their work around the world, but the purpose of this tour is to offer emerging artists the same opportunity. The program was split in two, so I unfortunately missed the work from Italy, but I did get to experience the work of all the other represented countries.

Luxembourg’s Anne-Mareike Hess got to open the evening with Remember, a three-media (dance, music, video) exploration of memory. Two musicians join her on the stage and force is to admit that they often take the spotlight away from Hess’s choreography. The middle of the floor is miked so that the sounds created by the dancer are amplified, drawing more attention to the movements that cause them. When she touches her skin and a musician rubs a piece of sandpaper at the same time, the skin itself becomes paper, hearing successfully invoking touch. Since the mind experiences sight and sound simultaneously and cannot separate them, the body gains a sonority that is not its own.

Angelica, by Great Britain’s Deborah Light, could be viewed in some respects as the foil to Remember; the sound consists mainly of a series of assembled music tracks and is not particularly interesting, but the choreography is much more memorable. Light creates a character with her own distinct corporality, hovering between the potentially dangerous vulnerability of childhood and the uncontrollable sexuality of adolescence. There are some truly eerie moments that emerge from the juxtaposition of opposing forces: speed and slowness, innocence and evil… The body sometimes appears possessed, creating well-cultivated moments of discomfort.

But if Dance Roads was worth seeing, it was for Montreal’s own Marie-Julie Asselin’s Projet de recherche. A work for five dancers and a live pianist, it is the kind of work that thrives on chaos. For the most part, the dancers evolve independently, but simultaneously, scattered across the stage. The audience members’ gaze is free to wander from one to the other, deciding where they focus their attention in a work where there is more to see than anyone can possibly take in at any given moment. As such, no two experiences of Projet de recherche could ever truly be the same. The movement resists grace and other socially codified conventions. It feels liberating, but that freedom is also frightening as those seeking it could see it all the way through to madness. It is the danger of raw energy, one whose emergence is fascinating to witness. Asselin is definitely a choreographer to keep an eye on.

For more information on Marie-Julie Asselin’s work with La Compagnie de la Tourmente, visit their website.

PREVIEW This week, metteure en scène Charmaine Leblanc presents Quarantaine, a project she had created for four women in 2004, where dancers were asked to dabble in artistic activities usually complementary to their own, such as voice, video, lighting, and musical composition. This year, the artistic director of Danse-Cité invited her to recreate the experience with four male performers, some of the best in the business: Marc Béland, Marc Daigle, Benoît Lachambre, and Ken Roy. It takes place at the S.A.T. from Tuesday, March 18 to Saturday, March 22. For more information: 514.844.2172.