Five bodies move to the rhythm of the metronome. Their mechanical movements resume, the machine heats up and demands impeccable rigour from them. As her artistic language matures, choreographer Catherine Gaudet sets out in search of a space beneath the bodies where desires can be reborn despite the weight of constraint.
Behind the innocuous appearance of this systematically traced collective score, there's a whiff of cheap varnish that will eventually crack. In tune with the contradictory pulsations of her time, Gaudet surrounds herself with her faithful accomplices to explore the pretense of the spectacular apparatus. After a while, repetition becomes the troublesome agent of performers turned instrumentalists. It makes the valve hiss, allowing the excess steam of salty bodies to escape. De-pression is the flip side of grandiosity. Here, the risk of a lapse in taste is very real, but necessary to maintain the balance.
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.
"A cathartic journey from naivety and conformity to liberation and power."
Aurea Grau Loire
Núvol Digital Culture, Barcelona
Compagnie Catherine Gaudet creates and presents contemporary dance. It supports research and the production and presentation of works by its artistic director, as well as their promotion and presentation nationally and internationally. The company is a point of convergence for remarkable, free-thinking artists dedicated to an insatiable search for shifting perceptions of reality, exploring the resultant complex ramifications on the body and the psyche while reveling in the astonishing fact of living, of being in the world yet creating something new.
Credits:
- Created by: Catherine Gaudet
- Performers: Dany Desjardins, Caroline Gravel, Lauren Semeschuk, James Phillips, Scott McCabe
- Music: Antoine Berthiaume
- Lighting Design: Hugo Dalphond
- Costume Design: Marilène Bastien
- Assistant Dramaturge and Rehearsal Director: Sophie Michaud
- Production: Compagnie Catherine Gaudet
- Co-Production: Festival TransAmériques, Agora de la danse, Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen, Réseau CanDance (Toronto), DLD - Daniel Léveillé Danse
- Development: DLD - Daniel Léveillé Danse
