Runaway girl

After studying with the masters Étienne Decroux in France and Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, it was ultimately in Japan that she found her calling in the early 1980s. A student of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, she became the first Westerner to join Min Tanaka’s dance company. Since 1988 Jocelyne Montpetit has created more than 30 dance pieces, developing a particular universe tinged with all those influences and drawing from both personal memory and collective experience. She has performed with her company in Canada, Europe, America and Asia, presenting works inspired by poetry or literature.

Invited in 2009 to work as a researcher and teacher of movement in the Department of Body Expression and Cinematic Arts at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, it was there that she performed The Ailing Dancer at The Loft theatre in 2012. That same year she received a six-month residency at the Studio du Québec in Tokyo, which allowed her to present Nuit Nacht Notte at the Kobe City Museum as well as The Ailing Dancer at the Kazuo Ohno Festival in Yokohama. Since then she has been going to Japan twice a year and also to Indonesia, presenting works from her repertoire. She often collaborates with artists from other disciplines such as theatre, film, architecture, photography and the visual arts. Her most recent project, Runaway Girl, was the subject of a photo exhibit by Andrea Lopez presented in St. Petersburg in 2016.