This workshop is conceived as a research and exploration laboratory where, through various avenues—visualizations, phantasmagoria, and role-playing—the choreographer will develop a style created directly on the dancers. The aim is to approach an ambiguous, shifting, ever-complex, even contradictory, sensitive posture from which the choreographic material will take shape.
Participants will be invited to explore a corporeality woven from subtle physical and psychological contradictions, where each individual's conscious and unconscious resistances and impulses will become active compositional materials.
In close collaboration with the participants, and through the interweaving of their creative intuitions with the choreographer's vision and writing, the workshop will seek this multifaceted state that constantly shifts, unfolds, and metamorphoses, in order to delve into the development of a dramaturgy of transformation.
Featured Artists
Catherine Gaudet ·
Catherine Gaudet holds a B.A. and M.A. in contemporary dance from UQAM, and has
established herself as a choreographer with a strong, singular signature. Reaching beneath the mask of social convention, she tracks down the jolts of the unconscious and the micromovements in the body that betray the emotions and sensations we try to hide. Obsessed by the quest for existential truth, she delves into the meanders of the psyche, seeking beauty in contradiction. Her state dance emerges from forces that oppose, constrain and control her flayed-looking characters. Her raw, precise physicality is mingled with a theatricality that subtly combines dramatic tension, a sense of the absurd and black humor.
She choreographed her first work in 2004, and made a name for herself the following two years with Grosse fatigue (2005), which won a prize at the Arthus International Choreography Competition (Denmark), and L’arnaque (2006). In 2009, she turned her attention to the effects of lack in her first full-length work, L’invasion du vide. Following creative residencies in Brussels (2010) and Berlin (2011), in 2012 she created Je suis un autre, in which she scratches away at the veneer of social facade to reveal the ambiguity of beings grappling with their contradictions. She pursued this intention in 2014 with Au sein des plus raides vertus, this time focusing on the notion of morality.
In 2016, in addition to a residency at the Centre chorégraphique national de Tours (France), she co-wrote La très excellente et lamentable tragédie de Roméo et Juliette with Jérémie Niel, a piece that transposes the Shakespearean legend into a huis-clos as sensual as it is melancholy. With Tout ce qui va revient (2018), she brings together on the same stage three solos from her repertoire, created in 2014 and 2015. It thus closes a cycle. In autonomous 2018, she presents her latest opus, L’affadissement du merveilleux, in Montreal. In 2021, she signs the solo Se dissoudre, which deals with the perception of time as an illusory phenomenon, and presents, at the FTA 2022, Les jolies choses, her latest creation for five dancers. In 2023, Catherine presents her new work Les mondes parallèles, featuring two remarkable performers: Louise Bédard and project initiator Sarah Williams. This is followed by the presentation of Mains Moites, a collaboration with director Brigitte Haentjens and performer Francis Ducharme. In 2024, with the Centre de Création O Vertigo and ODE, she creates her first large-scale work. Alongside her creative activities, she was a founding member of the Lorganisme company from 2010 to 2019; co-director of the Centre de Création O’ Vertigo alongside Ginete Laurin, Mélanie Demers and Caroline Laurin-Beaucage; guest professor at UQAM’s Département de danse in 2018-2019; and lecturer at the same institution from 2019 to 2021. Catherine is currently artistic director and general manager of Compagnie Catherine Gaudet, a member of Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique, associate creator at DLD - Daniel Léveillé Danse and associate artist at Agora de la danse.
James Phillips · Dancer
James Phillips completed the professional training program at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School. In 2005, he completed the professional program at the School of Contemporary Dancers and then moved to Ottawa where he spent four years as a company member of Le Groupe Dance Lab under the direction of Peter Boneham. James moved to Montréal in 2009 to join Ginette Laurin’s company O Vertigo. After six years, he performed his last show with O Vertigo in November 2015. For the 2015/2016 season, James was a guest artist at Toronto Dance Theater taking part in creations by Christopher House, Alyssa Martin, Alex Napier, and Andrew Tay. James also took part in Toronto Dance Theater’s Singular Bodies project. In February 2016, James returned to Winnipeg to work with Freya Bjorg Olafson and Lise McMillan in Olafson’s new creation C.P.A (Consistent Partial Attention) for the newly formed Collective Corps. James joined Toronto Dance Theatre as a company member for the 2016/2017 season, dancing in works by Christopher House and Ame Henderson. In recent years, James has collaborated in the research and creation projects of Catherine Gaudet, Emmanuel Jouthe, Louise Bédard and Virginie Brunelle.