What Happened to Bodies, Part 2: The Best of the FTA

Last week, the first ever Festival TransAmériques began with great confidence by offering us original and demanding works from both sides of the ocean. The festival, which is dedicated to both dance and theatre, certainly opened with strength in the dance department…

Umwelt, Maguy Marin
Unfortunately, French choreographer Maguy Marin did not receive the warm welcome she deserves. Her ambitious work, Umwelt, opened the festival. It is an astounding study of everyday gestures. Performers emerge from behind a series of mirrors that are violently shaking due to powerful fans standing out of sight. As they pass in front of us, for just a few seconds, they perform a common gesture before disappearing again behind the mirrors. This cycle is repeated throughout the length of the show, sometimes offering us a variety of movement, sometimes coming back to the same ones, just as we do in the routine that is our life. The result might be difficult for those with a short attention span, but patient viewers are treated to a touching homage to the everyday. I cannot help but feel overcome by the most extreme judgment in the presence of this work: if you cannot enjoy it, you cannot enjoy life, simply because that is what Marin is offering to us at the most literal level. Nothing short of a masterpiece.

Quantum-Quintet, Brice Leroux
The following night, we were treated to another minimalist work, Brice Leroux’s Quantum-Quintet. We enter the room to find a large mirror reflecting the audience back to itself. As the lights in the house dim and the ones behind the mirror intensify, five performers appear behind the glass. They are all wearing black, except for their naked forearms and their face, their only visible body parts. Even their face eventually disappears as their forearms become the only focus of this highly synchronized choreography of limbs. Soon, the eye cannot even see the forearms as such anymore, and they simply become lines. Evoking different patterns that could be as many physical combinations to open a lock, the work is not surprisingly unique and intensely hypnotic, which leaves the audience in timeless suspension. When the lights came on at the end of the show, I felt I had only been there for 15 minutes instead of the 45 I actually was, and wished the show had gone on for twice as long.

Un peu de tendresse, bordel de merde, Dave St-Pierre
Not surprisingly, Dave St-Pierre’s much anticipated follow-up to his masterpiece La Pornographie des âmes quickly sold out, people standing in front of the venue with homemade signs, hoping to score an extra ticket. His new work is as equally frank, brutal, and lucid as the former, though it is nowhere near as tight or ambitious. However, force is to recognize that it is highly unfair to compare any work to La Pornographie des âmes, even one by the same choreographer. Despite a few tableaux that go on for too long, Un peu de tendresse, bordel de merde still has enough laughter and moments of brilliance and beauty that will stick to your brain long after the show is over to become one of the most memorable shows of the year. Dave St-Pierre is quite simply one of the most urgent voices of this generation.

Three shows that are sure to stand out in our mind when the year comes to an end and we look back on 2007. Based on the quality of these works alone, we can only hope that the Festival TransAmériques is here to stay.