LES ENTREVUES 303
Cette année, le Studio 303 innove et présente des entrevues exclusives avec les artistes de sa programmation.
Laura Beeston, Éditrice en Chef du journal « The Link » de l’Université Concordia et bloggeuse vedette du Festival Edgy Women, offre des portraits atypiques, drôles et fascinants de ces créateurs et de leur pratique artistique.
** Les entrevues sont uniquement disponibles en anglais **
Entrevue réalisée avec Thomas Hauert et Scott Heron – étoiles de Like me more like me présentée le 21 et 22 janvier.
Plus d’informations sur le spectacle ici.
Improv, Difference and Dance
de Laura Beeston
Improvisation, common histories and the mutual eruption of dance is what drives Thomas Hauert and Scott Heron’s collaboration Like me more like me, which is taking over Studio 303 Jan. 21 and 22.
After the two artists met through a movement research improv festival two years ago, it clicked. They knew they must combine their intense physicality with “what came out of both of us at an early age” to create together.
“It was kind of difficult, artistically, in periods where we [were deciding] what could be made, what our artistic preoccupations were and what we could put in this piece,” admitted the Belgium-based Hauert, who will return to Montreal after nearly a decade. “But that’s what’s interesting about the process.”
Living on different continents, from different backgrounds, and in different professional circles of theatres and audiences, the two built the piece trans-nationally and got together for weeks at a time, spending seven-hour days in the studio, improvising.
What they found is they weren’t so different after all, especially on the floor. An innate sense of physical knowing and the desire to dance informed both from a very young age.
“We don’t agree on what this piece is all about. There was some baseline, or theme you could distill out of it, that drove me when I digested things, or helped us make choices, but maybe you can’t see them so clearly,” said Hauert, who speaks emphatically, physically, and with his hands.
“[Like me more like me is] not a movement study or a conceptual piece. It’s more of a theatrical, sensual. It’s not something you should look at with your brain only,” Hauert continued. “Receive it with your whole being, history and associationism. [...] It’s more of an emotional trip.”
“One of the million things” Hauert said Like me more like me touches on is a sense of sentimentality. When they looked up the definitions starting out, the duo found some were neutral, some were “ridiculously emotional” and others were are judgmental.
He quotes poet Mason Cooley during our interview: “Fearful of sentimentality. I disown my tears and melting hearts.” Pretty dramatic stuff, he laughs.
“People might see all kinds of references and associations, but it’s melted together,” explained Hauert. “Nothing in particular stands out in the piece and that’s perhaps part of its strength. It became this thing you cannot talk easily about, it’s not so clear. Some people see humour in it, think it’s light and absurd, while other people thing it’s very sad and dark.”
Different circles, worlds, identities, groups and images colliding may be the ‘baseline’ of this narrative, but Heron — who is based in New York and is a well-known gender bender— was quick to point out that the piece is still heavily grounded in theatrical sensibility.
Calling it a “hardcore dance piece,” Heron explained that both men “had to meet in the middle. Thomas is very movement oriented, and I’m more theatrical. We brought some of both into it.”
Hinting at his bookmark absurdities — costume changes, flamboyant camp and “bizarre and passionate states” — Heron said the piece was drama spread through dance.
“Some death, passion and weirdness, held together by improv in the way we work” was the way he described what’s coming, with improv acting as the duo’s strongest link.
Heron added that a particular “brotherlyness” can be pinpointed in the piece, as they both looked at themselves as queer men with shared experiences in different realities.
A paradoxical “twin difference,” of experience lays the foundation for this physical piece, where they build from the exchange
“We’re leaving the theatre exposed on stage,” said Heron, “bringing both of ourselves into it.”
Entrevue réalisée avec Tedi Tafel, créatrice de Janvier. Cette performance-installation est présentée au 661 Rose de Lima (métro Lionel-Groulx) les 13-14-15 & 20-21-22 janvier 2012.
Plus d’informations sur le spectacle ici.
JANVIER : a chat with Tedi Tafel
by Laura Beeston
The start of this calendar year has a special significance for Studio 303’s first production in 2012, as Montreal-based choreographer Tedi Tafel brings Janvier to wintry life in an old railway building Jan. 13 – 15, and 20-22.
Season dictates the pace of this sensual, site-specific performance piece. The relationship between body and the 6,000-sq.-ft. space takes centre stage, and will be transposed with light and movement.
This scene will be the set of what Tafel described as “dance created out of architecture.”
Janvier is the re-mastering of a work that was created in a two-and-a-half week residency a few years ago for a full-year project called Calendar. “My desire with the remount was to go deeper with the piece,” explained Tafel. “A chance to take it further for the people involved.”
Going back to the original site with the original cast, four dancers, two live electro-musicians combine their talents with a lighting director and video projector to re-play nine different “movement events” that lead into each other.
The piece runs for three hours, looping circularly over time, and the audience is invited to come and go as they please, walk around, and install themselves as close or far as they feel.
“I wanted to change the conventions of what is a performance and who is an audience, looking into how we respond when the usual criteria isn’t offered,” said Tafel. “It allows the audience to participate in a different way—they have choices. It makes them more active, more participating. It’s more than just sitting and watching.”
There is no pressure in the slow-paced production to run around from room to room to see everything, she continued, as Janvier offers a winter hibernating feel as the dance unfolds.
“It was important for me to revisit Janvier in January […] as the piece itself speaks really about the beginning of the year,” said Tafel. “That time, the senses of life underground, that slowing down, that beginning.”
Explaining that the team of dancers have infiltrated new work from what came after in the Calendar project while also reminiscing certain gestures and moments, adding anew to the performance has allowed for a freedom “to let [the piece] feed back,” said Tafel.
“Our collaborators have more time than we did the initial run of the show with the space and with each other,” she said. Allowing elements from the whole year to come back into place has made for new and valuable discoveries.
Tafel, who has taken many trips to immerse herself in the nature landscape of Boreal forest to Mexico to Iceland, has been studying bodies in non-traditional and natural venues for the last two decades.
“Every single space will have a new discovery,” said the artist. “I can’t know what that is until we really get in the place […] and start to see how one participates in the environment. I can’t hold tightly to my ideas because they need to be able to alter and transform once the dancer makes contact with the actual architecture, or the light, or the neighbourhood, or the sounds. The space is very alive. I love the interaction.”
Describing the connection between body and space as “dancing with rather than dancing in,” Tafel explained she looks for spaces with unique qualities, windows, as well as the presence or absence of natural space in the urban city.
“I’m always looking for the essentialized movement,” she explained. “I really feel strongly that dance should exist in the regular and daily spaces.
“It’s essential to understanding things about humanity that we can’t understand when we’re separated in the theatre,” she continued. “Theatre has amazing things to offer, but I’m mostly excited about what dance is as a language and what the relationship is to our surroundings.
“It’s about how dance can express this and inspire us to be more sensitive to where we are.”
Entrevue réalisée avec Chad Dembski (surprise performance), créateur de la pièce Utopia : est-ce possible? présentée le 10 décembre à 18 h et le 11 décembre à 16 h au Studio 303.
Pour informations supplémentaires, cliquez ici.
UTOPIA POSSIBLE : a chat with Chad Dembki
by Laura Beeston
How timely that the surprise creation Utopia : est-ce Possible? falls on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street clean-up worldwide. As we look around at tents being pitched and pummeled, it seems opportune to ask ourselves: in one night, what can be made? Destroyed? Re-created?
Interested in how cults and movements begin, communes are born and how, exactly, counter-cultural fascinations inspire, collective leader Chad Dembski explores utopic spaces, feelings and forms in this multi-disciplinary manifesto, running at Studio 303 Dec. 10 and 11.
“[We worked] from discussions of attainable utopias, Dembski said, “but not in the typical grand scales—not all of a city, or all of a society. It’s nice to use a microcosm, specifically the potential of a live show, [to explore] the impossibility of creating utopia, mirrored with some of the possibility of creating it in performance.”
Starting from a narrative that Montreal is ‘the best city to live in Canada’ for many Anglo-, Franco- and Allophones (before they actually live through a bitter winter, or realize the “negative things, too”), Dembski and his team attempted to attain what he called the ‘realistic impossible.’
Requiring a degree of compromise, it searches to strike a balance to sustain perfection or, at the very least, a realistic goal, explained Dembski.
In an age of boundless information where we are hardly given solutions to the issues in the world-at-large, Dembski explained the realistic impossible keeps the desire, dynamic opportunity and sacrifice alive.
“Vague, spirited manifesto’s are inspiring, but do they have any practical organization?” he asked. “Realistic impossible is this nice little in-between. The attainable.”
Launching from this idea, Utopia combines video, song and dance generated from a personal process developed within the collective, which is rounded out by artists Dana Michel, Jacqueline van de Geer, Jonathan Fournier, Simon Portigal and Chrystie Reid.
“What’s the point of writing fake stories about fake people, and then have actors fake it out while trying to create an emotional response?” challenged Dembski, when speaking to the multi-personal approach he took to create the Utopic narrative. “There’s an easier route to that: tell a real story.”
Allowing the collective to self-generate, regardless of the “incredible success or incredible failure” that may come of it, the narrative builds from the members making their own choices.
“The energy is different; its liveliness in the live theatre. It accentuates the experience of performance,” he said. “To build something yourself, without a pre-determined idea of what it will be or what to expect, creates a curiosity that people [connect with].”
Avoiding the more conservative traditions of performance art by “obeying the director, wearing the clothes and playing in the set of someone else’s design,” Dembski said the collective didn’t limit themselves to allow the project to evolve. And neither should a quest for ‘the perfect world.’
“The show changed a lot,” he admitted. “At a certain point, I wasn’t even interested in the pre-recorded theatre and video I thought I was.”
Finding a commitment in the autonomy of artists’ making their own choices, Dembski gave his group leeway to fully explore what a working utopia could be. Pushing those boundaries, borrowing from elements of manifesto and motion, and flirting away from tradition, Utopia: Est-Ce Possible challenges us to view an impossible world realistically, but with fundamental fuel of hope in new creation.
Entrevue avec Angus Balbernie, qui présentait son duo réalisé avec Guillaume Chouinard lors du programme partagé avec Kira Kirsch et Kelly Keenan (kirsh&keenan dance endeavors) le 22 octobre à 18 h et le 23 octobre à 16 h au Studio 303.
Pour informations supplémentaires, cliquez ici.
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE – Angus Balbernie on Direction, Dance Ecology and his return to 303
by Laura Beeston
“People ask me to describe my work and, wickedly, I tend to just write what I want for fun—you’re allowed to at my age. …I’m a bit naughty,” says Angus Balbernie—award-winning, international choreography director extraordinaire—when asked about what to expect from his upcoming work Compasses, Felons and Carnal Knowledge
“[The audience] is always looking for interesting, different narratives in all these dance blurbs and write ups—but the truth is, if you want to learn about something, you should go to a book, you don’t go to a dance. I prefer dance to be ambiguous and abstract in that sense. You let your own perceptual system work it out. You trust your own gut, not the write up.”
The articulate Balbernie, who had no trouble speaking at length about his upcoming performance work in collaboration with local artist Guillaume Chouinard at Studio 303, explained that performance is “a shortcut through language.”
Returning to Montreal after nearly a decade, Balbernie admitted that he and Chouinard, who collaborated in Montreal extensively 22-odd years ago, don’t remember anything about the duet they did back then, and are starting from scratch.
“This is how I love to work,” he mused. “I don’t really ever have any pre-conceptions about making work as a director; you start with the people. An idea comes up, about art, about life, and you just take a walk—but this is going to be about two people being lost, and finding themselves again.”
Paired with a live musician, the duet will encompass elements of theatre, dance and interaction with the physical space. “We’ll get the compass out, get the map, put it in the studio and start,” he said.
Drawing influences from academia—namely ecology, anthropology and urban studies—Balbernie explained this is the basis of what he believes choreography should be, or “the objective shaping of tuned space.”
“It’s kind of denying the body as a unit of performance making,” he admitted, “but I have a fascination with space and how you use it choreographically and physically. There is an equal agreement between both the body and the spaces—it’s how you work with both, really (…) Directing is a really important skill [in dance], and is often not recognized as an art form…Directing is not choreography.”
Balbernie is researching the union of ecology and performance—pursuing the links between the vibrant thinking behind both art and science. Ecology seems a fitting theme for this work, as it will be aired and paired with kirsh&keenan dance endeavors, who are presenting a work entitled Useless Creatures, exploring displaced species, disturbed ecosystems and physical survival attempts.
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