The FTA Is Back – (Mostly) Dance Preview

In an effort to build up anticipation for the dance and theatre Festival TransAmériques, I have avoided dance for the past few weeks. Last year’s first edition turned out to be a most pleasant surprise, offering the kind of works too seldom seen, those that polarize audiences, that have the courage to leave no one indifferent. Fortunately, some of the shows this year seem to promise similarly singular experiences.

Noémie Lafrance’s MELT, photo by Shaul Schwarz

The festival begins with one of its free events, the presentation of exiled-in-New-York Quebec artist Noémie Lafrance’s choreographic installation MELT. Renowned for her dance performances in highly unusual places, this particular work requires five dancers to be fastened high overhead to an exterior wall at the Esplanade of Place des Arts, their bodies covered in beeswax and lanolin, dripping from their limbs at they melt under the heat of the lights and the sun.

Coming off strong from her duo with Benoît Lachambre backed by a live musician, Forgeries, Love and Other Matters, Meg Stuart promises to offer an equally atmospheric show with Austrian choreographer Philipp Gehmacher and Belgian singer-songwriter Niko Hafkenschield with Maybe Forever. It is an encounter where everything falls apart – memory, movement, embrace – a fight against each other and the ephemeral nature of all things.

Her old partner, on the other hand, is rekindling with Louise Lecavalier in Is You Me. Inspired from the slow solo Lachambre had created for her, I Is Memory, the Quebec choreographer now immerses himself in this new piece to create a duo about identity, fusion, and distance that crystallizes their desire to dance together.

Mariano Pensotti’s La Marea

The theatre section of the festival also has its free event, La Marea. Émery Street will be closed to circulation so that the public can observe a Quebec cast perform in Argentinian director Mariano Pensotti’s street theatre, where spectators are free to watch whatever catches their eye as they stroll from one end of the street to the other. In these scenes without dialogue, English and French surtitles are projected overhead to provide access to the characters’ intimate thoughts and desires.

A dance show that has already caught the eye of many is Turkish choreographer Aydin Teker’s aKabi. In this work, Teker has her dancers wear enormous platform shoes, pushing them into an exploration of the limits of gravity and its effects on the body.

On the other hand, Quebec choreographer Paul-André Fortier prefers to be completely mobile, performing Cabane in four different sites over seven days. The shack in question is a real, portable and readily convertible hut that will journey to unusual places such as an indoor parking lot and a ballroom. It is a world unto itself – a shelter, a workshop, a screen, or perhaps a mausoleum – enmeshed in spaces strongly evocative of luxury, poverty, and artifice.

Then a pit stop in theatre again to check out the contribution that “dance accomplices” Claude Godin and Dave St-Pierre have brought to Loui Mauffette’s Poésie, Sandwichs et Autres soirs qui penchent, described as a banquet of poems served on a huge table. Above and around the table, actors, singers, dancers, and musicians fling words at each other as though raising a toast to friendship.

Bound to be one of the highlights of the festival, Marie Chouinard follows her spectacular bODY_rEMIX with her new creation, Orphée et Eurydice. This demonic dance piece exposes the visceral sources of creation as subterranean forces surge through the bodies and propel them in a sinister, surreal universe, a world where the grotesque vies with the erotic.

The festival closes with Martin Bélanger’s Grande Théorie Unifiée, where miscellaneous objects are strewn about a space where dance and music, high and low art, the private and the social, freely mingle. Conventional and popular art forms co-exist or merge together and on the stage performers and technicians are equals, blurring distinctions about who does what.

For more information on these shows and many more, check out the festival’s website at http://www.fta.qc.ca