This season Agora de la dance opens with another masterpiece of modern dance, a collaboration between choreographers Hélène Blackburn and Pierre Lecours, the creative team behind the notorious Suites Cruelles (2010). Their new creation, Duels, is composed of 19 encounters and confrontations between two or three dancers with varying gender dynamics, roles, and power struggles. However, unlike the gender-problematic movements and codes of Suites Cruelles, Duels is more balanced in terms of gender equality in movement, diverse in imagination, styles, and still powerful in modern dance codes.
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Cirque du Soleil – Michael Jackson Immortal World Tour
Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson the Immortal World Tour is perhaps the closest you can come to seeing Michael Jackson live in concert today, but the experience is even more enhanced with the incredible cutting-edge technology of light, sound, screen projections, screen graphics, and the talent of world-class acrobats, dancers, choreographers, musicians, and set and light designers, all collaborating with Cirque du Soleil.
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After years of training as a flamenco dancer in Seville and Madrid, and working as a professional dancer in Spain, France, and Germany, Myriam Allard came back to her native Montréal and founded a flamenco company La Otra Orilla (the other shore) in 2006 with Hedi “el Moro” Graja.
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Ghislaine Doté is a UQAM graduate in dance and has been choreographing dance performances since 2002. Merry Age is her artistic contribution to Montreal’s Black History Month (organized by Agora de la danse, Circuit-Est, le Mai, le Studio 303, Tangente and Nyata-Nyata – celebrating contemporary creation from artists of the African Diaspora).
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Bijoux is the latest performance piece conceptualized by Marie-Gabrielle Ménard, founder of MANDALA SITÙ, a “laboratory-incubator-greenhouse for feminine dance studies,” featuring five female dancers in solos choreographed by five local male choreographers.
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“This is not a piece about Berlin” is announced in four languages at the beginning of Berlin Elsewhere as ten people step onto the stage and begin to twirl and dance without music. One of the props – a styrofoam model of a high-rise building – collapses and the dancers begin to use it as a platform for their movements. Einstürzende Neubauten comes to mind. Two musicians on a side stage (set up with instruments) begin to play. The dancers continue to dance to the music. Their movement is that of fragmentation and interruption. They fall and get back up, only to fall again (knee pads are integrated into the costumes).
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Cinq Humeurs – Pre-consciousness of Movement
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Thanks to my wonderful friend Charlotte I got to discover the sensual world of Tango in Montréal. Right above one of my favourite international live music bars, Les Bobards, on Boulevard St. Laurent is a whole new world of dance with a sexy flair in the air.
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Dancemakers, Toronto’s trouble makers, come to Montreal with their latest creation, It’s about time: 60 dances in 60 minutes. By working on the way we perceive time, on the way it works and influences us, on what happens when it contracts, expands or stays the same, choreographer Michael Trent tells us of his uneasiness before all that is absolute.
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Thread – choreographed and performed by Margie Gillies
Margie Gillis, 56, an icon of Quebec contemporary dance, is celebrating 37 years as a professional dancer. With Thread, Gillis explores the ebb and flow of energy, weaving strands of life and movement, exploring the aging body. Its fabric-like structure examines the connectedness to source and explores our own personal maze.
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Modern Dance and Gender Relations
Rarely are there representations of femininity, even in feminist art, that represent what femininity means to me. Mass media is largely constructed around the spectacle principle, ideologically coded with patriarchal hierarchy, domination, and power struggles. Feminist art, to this day, is more concerned with deconstructing, mocking, mimicking, exaggerating and exposing patriarchy for what it is, rather than constructing positive and inspiring visions of femininity. So what then, are accurate representations of femininity and gender relations today to an audience of 20 to 40 year old “third-wave-feminists”?
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Kat Sark
