Review: Ganas de Vivir

After Sarah Chase’s tackling of death in Sur les glaces du Labrador, Élodie Lombardo takes the subject head-on with Ganas de Vivir. Not to say that her work is any heavier. After all, the title does mean “desire to live”. The topic is visually breached from the start as a shrine filled with flowers and burning candles sits at the back of the stage.

Ganas de Vivir is very theatrical, maybe because it is performed by dancers, actors, and musicians, and the lines between these roles are not always clear. There is also the presence of a set, four simple wooden caskets complementing the shrine. The dancers roll into them to great effect, offering an unusual image, human beings willingly rushing to get under ground.

Death is also personified by Frédéric Gagnon, who offers a simultaneously creepy and humorous performance worthy of a Tim Burton film. The tall man with a shaved head adorns a red dress in which, from the back, his bony shoulder blades transform into breasts.

One of Ganas de Vivir’s strong points is its creative use of live music. There is the tapping of the finger on a jack to create a heartbeat. There is also the woman who tap dances on a casket, showing her desire to live fully even (or maybe especially) in the face of death. An accordion creates the breath of life when it is played without musical notes. All the performers join in for a choral number that gets louder, more insane, and tormenting by the minute, an aural descent into madness.

After being shut away in caskets, performers emerge and dance as if resurrected or as ghosts freed of the flesh. The movement is often violent, men pushing each other, or a woman’s limbs flying in the air as her lifeless body is lifted by a man. In such moments, we are sent back to science-fiction writer William Gibson’s vision of the human body as nothing more than meat.

But of course it is more than that. Maybe I should correct myself; Ganas de vivir is not about death. It is about life in the face of death. We can see this in how much energy emanates from the performers, for example in the dynamic section where they throw tin basins to each other while they keep dancing and a man uses the basins as drums, a sequence that is reminiscent of some antics by the Belgian dance company Ultima Vez.

Another great point: the tactful use of the non-dancing bodies in the space. A weaker point: the ending, though symbolically appropriate, still feels rather abrupt. Maybe this is due to the fact that Ganas de Vivir is a series of vignettes that, despite being thematically coherent, lack any kind of progression and as such seem arbitrarily ordered. Still, it is a minor fault in an overall good show.

Ganas de Vivir continues until October 4 at Monument-National. Regular tickets are 27$, 20$ for students. For more information, visit www.danse-cite.org or call 514-844-2172.