Peau d’or, sors de l’ombre & Le Zoo “Chaleurhumaine”: A Review

It’s almost a return to Tangente’s Double Territoire days we get to experience this week. Two thirty-minute works by different choreographers. One where the audience is sitting in the front of the room; the other, where we walk through the back door and around the space. And, even though they share a few characteristics and primarily function at an experiential level, they remain quite distinct.

First comes Emmanuelle Calvé’s Peau d’or, sors de l’ombre, performed by herself and David Albert-Toth. It begins in a certain discomfort, with a disembodied female voice humming. When she emerges from the shadows, Calvé’s body doesn’t seem to be her own. She is young, and yet everything about the way she moves implies otherwise: her head is tilted back, her lips are pursed, her eyes closed, and her body tilts back and forth to the point where it could almost be said to be shaking.

However, it does not remain so. The body undergoes quite a few transformations throughout the piece. Both performers’ eyes often remain closed or barely open, as if they were in a trance that allows different spirits to take over their body. But to speak of souls possessed would infuse Peau d’or with a violence it never exhibits. Here, spirits flow through the body and only leave behind their most positively transformative powers.

There is some humour to be found, like when Calvé is wearing a long cone for a beak but launches into a series of repetitive movements with an aerobic aesthetic. The disjunction between the way her body is presented — animalistic — and the way it moves — typically human — draws a smile upon our lips. The choreography is at its best when the dancers repeat movements as their limbs extend more and more into space, as if they could eventually reach the sky. At other times, most specifically in its duets, it flirts a bit too much with a So-You-Think-You-Can-Dance corniness. However, by the same virtue, it’s not without being seductive.

But what impresses me the most in Peau d’or is its seamless transitions. From the beginning, the mechanics of the show (when Albert-Toth pulls on a rope to bring down a screen, for example) become an intrinsic part of its scenography (it is his shadow from behind the screen we see, making the common dramatic). Even better is how Calvé deftly uses depth to shift the audience’s focus as the dancers slowly cross paths. One moment we’re looking at Calvé, only to realize a few seconds later that our attention has drifted towards Albert-Toth without even noticing it. This might be a good opportunity to mention that he proves to be a fantastic dancer with an incomprehensible body.

Michaël Cros’s Le Zoo “Chaleurhumaine” takes a different approach, but is equally fascinating. The audience is guided by a metallic voice through a human zoo where two performers, also male and female, interact with quasi-human-sized dummies covered from head to toe in black lycra. Some of them are suspended by ropes to the ceiling, triggering most disturbing images of lynching. While at first Chaleurhumaine works more on an intellectual level, it evolves into a haunting experience that still manages to raise important questions. Is pornography the modern zoo (and maybe more specifically non-conformist sexuality)? What is considered monstrous even today? Who is whose savage?

You can catch this double program on Friday and Saturday (January 29 & 30) at 7:30pm, and Sunday (January 31) at 4pm. Tickets are 17$, 14$ for students. For more information, visit www.tangente.qc.ca or call 514.525.1500.