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Les jolies choses

Catherine Gaudet

With her ripened artistic language, Catherine Gaudet surrounds herself with her loyal collaborators to explore the false pretenses of the show business apparatus.

Details

Intake of Air

Five bodies move to the rhythm of a metronome. Their mechanical gestures are endlessly reprised, the machine runs wild and demands their absolute compliance. With her ripened artistic language, choreographer Catherine Gaudet seeks a space within bodies where desires can be reborn despite the burden of constriction.

This seemingly harmless collective score, with its orderly routes, gives off a scent of cheap veneer that will soon end up cracking. Attuned to the conflicting throbbing of her era, Gaudet surrounds herself with her loyal collaborators to explore the false pretenses of the show business apparatus. After a while, repetition reveals itself to be the troublemaker among the dancers-turned-instrumentalists. It pushes open the whistling valve to release the excess vapour of salted bodies. Indeed, de-pressure is the flip side of grandiosity. Here, the risk of tastelessness is all too real, but necessary in order to maintain balance.

Credits

Produced by Compagnie Catherine Gaudet

Choreographed by Catherine Gaudet

Performed by Francis Ducharme + Caroline Gravel + James Phillips + Scott McCabe + Lauren Semeschuk

Music Antoine Berthiaume

Performed by Vagelis Karipis (voice) + Eirini Tornesaki (voice) + Roman Zavada (piano) + Skar (voice and bass) + Manuel di Camillo (drums) + Antoine Berthiaume (guitars)

Lighting Design Hugo Dalphond

Costume Design Marilène Bastien

Rehearsal Sophie Michaud

Production and Technical Director François Marceau

Co-produced by Festival TransAmériques + Agora de la danse + Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen + Réseau CanDance (Toronto) + Centre national des Arts (Ottawa) + Harbourfront Center (Toronto) + DLD-Daniel Léveillé Danse

Presented by ARTV

In association with Fonds GB

Catherine Gaudet is a member of Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique, an associate artist at DLD-Daniel Léveillé Danse and at Agora de la danse.

Premiered at Festival TransAmériques, Montreal, on May 28, 2022

World première

Written by Myriam Perraton-Lambert

Translated by Luba Markovskaia

Catherine Gaudet (Montreal)
Compagnie Catherine Gaudet

On Catherine Gaudet’s stage, social masks come off to the rhythm of bodies exulting. After surveying the troubling truths and irreverent underground pathways of our humanity with Au sein des plus raides vertus (FTA, 2014) and Tout ce qui va revient (2018), Gaudet is back at FTA with a whole new piece, Les jolies choses. This time, she steps away from the theatrical aspects of her earlier works, all the while maintaining her subversive powers.

Full biography