2007
FESTIVAL TRANSAMÉRIQUES — 1st EDITION
A Certain Braided History + The Disappearance
SARAH CHASE (HORNBY ISLAND)A Certain Braided History + The Disappearance
Both a dancer of stories and a storyteller in motion, the Toronto choreographer Sarah Chase often speaks as she dances, with the narrative evolving through both speech and movement. She gently and intimately crafts a poetics of memory that is linked to childhood memory, conjuring up her parents or next-door neighbours as she spins her tales of sensitive, emotive experiences, projecting everyday life into a place of enchantment.
Arena
ISRAEL GALVÁN (SÉVILLE)Arena
Incredibly adept at revivifying and renewing, the Spaniard Israel Galván bursts head first into flamenco tradition, taking the imaginary bull by the horns and stripping flamenco of its pretensions and affectations. Like an actor in a Greek tragedy, he is surrounded by a chorus of cantaores (singers) and musicians. The fiery dancer and choreographer makes his way into the arena in concentric circles and engages in an impassioned combat consisting of six “bullfighting” solo dances.
CHS
CHRISTIAN LAPOINTE (QUÉBEC)CHS
It almost always happens to lonely, sedentary individuals. They are found to have been burned alive, consumed by fire from within. Only the body is reduced to ashes, with the armchair, the sheets and mattress, untouched. They are victims of Spontaneous Human Combustion, SHC (or CHS). An inner Hiroshima, a private gas chamber, the phenomenon remains profoundly disturbing and partially unexplained.
Crépuscule des océans
DANIEL LÉVEILLÉ (MONTRÉAL)Crépuscule des océans
Dance that absolutely asserts itself as dance. Dance that is unadorned and rigorous. Dance that is an allegorical ocean, powerful and unfathomable, with violent, tempestuous movements and tremendous silences. Daniel Léveillé’s latest work Crépuscule des océans(Twilight of the Oceans) invites the audience to follow the ebb and flow of a human tide, exploring its depths and our dark side.
Famous Puppet Death Scenes
TIM SUTHERLAND (CANADA)Famous Puppet Death Scenes
Short philosophical tales, stories that are silly and amusing or that touch the collective imagination, comical playlets, funny, satirical fables in verse and stirring, moralist comedies are all part of Famous Puppet Death Scenes. These gems are taken from the repertoire of puppetry and all deal with death, with death viewed as either desperate or invigorating. Scenes are presented as dumb shows or are tied together by narration, with the puppeteers sometimes hidden and at other times in full view.
Fantasmagories technologiques I, II, III
DENIS MARLEAU (MONTRÉAL)Fantasmagories technologiques I, II, III
In three striking technological presentations, the brilliant illusionist Denis Marleau orchestrates a voyage to the land of absence. The journey takes the audience into a world where three tiny beings perched on high bring a bizarre story of children to life, children lost in an undefined place, their dreams shifting from the past to the present, between existence and its opposite. Then the audience moves, plunging into vaudeville that is devoid of slamming doors and lovers hiding in closets, venturing into a Beckett-like variation of the husband-wife-mistress trio that reveals the solitude of individuals by portraying the ridiculous aspects of life and love as we feel our way forward in total darkness. Then twelve faces suddenly appear in the darkness. They gaze at nothing, however, for they are all blind. Abandoned in a dark forest, they await their guide, who does not show up.
FRANK KETCHUP
CAROLE NADEAU (MONTREAL)FRANK KETCHUP
Frankenstein, a cold-blooded icon suffused with terror. Never in the history of humanity have we ever been so close to the myth, for we are at the beginning of a new era, where reshaping and remaking the body is widespread, a game of combinations where the frontiers between people and things, between beings and matter, will gradually dissolve.
HEY GIRL!
ROMEO CASTELLUCCI (CESENA)HEY GIRL!
Theatre of the subconscious revealed, theatre that draws its inspiration from the founding myths of Western culture and theatre where science, sound composition and visual arts are inextricably linked, the theatre of the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio assails those who dare stare it in the face, stirring up passions and provoking either discomfort or total adherence
INCARNAT
LIA RODRIGUES (RIO DE JANEIRO)INCARNAT
Inspired by Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others, Lia Rodrigues’ Incarnat is a piece presented in bright vivid red, a work that questions the nature of our relationship toward the suffering of others. A choreographer and founder of the Festival Panorama Rio Arte Dança, Lia Rodrigues has made her mark on the Brazilian stage with her political commitment and her work with the poor and the disadvantaged.
LIFE IS BUT A DREAM #1
PATRICIA ALLIO (RENNES)LIFE IS BUT A DREAM #1
Like Shakespeare, Patricia Allio believes that we are such stuff as dreams are made on. Based on the works of the American punk and queer writer Kathy Acker, she has created a dream object, a protean project that is part theatre, part concert and part film. Life is but a dream # 1 is freely adapted from the sharp audacity of Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School and enriched by material collected in New York City.
LIPSYNCH
ROBERT LEPAGE (QUÉBEC / NEWCASTLE)LIPSYNCH
A fabulous soap opera that flirts with both the saga of our planet and the ideas of physicist Stephen Hawking, Lipsynchproposes a series of alternate destinies, of superimposed lives and voices, in fact nothing less than an inventory of the world with its absences and its black holes, seen through the ups and downs of men and women brought together by chance and probability. Nine stories are linked together, the rules of chronology are abolished and microfictions bump into each other like marbles in a pinball machine activated by the conjurer Lepage.
MNEMOPARK
STEFAN KAEGI (BÂLE/BERLIN)MNEMOPARK
The Mnemopark express is leaving the station, and we’re off on a mad dash across Switzerland aboard a miniature electric train, a scale model train equipped with a tiny video camera that journeys through pretty mountain scenery, landscapes with pretty chalets and farmers attending to beautiful cows that provide the milk used to make good Swiss chocolate. A few retirees who are passionate model railroad buffs act as tourist guides commenting on the images. Assisted by an actress, they talk about themselves by talking about their country. With lots of humour and plenty of details, they guide us on a surprising trip that reveals snatches of lives lived and fragments of history.
PERSPECTIVES MONTRÉAL
ISABELLE VAN GRIMDE (MONTRÉAL)PERSPECTIVES MONTRÉAL
Exchange, transmission, circulation choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde is an artist who associates friendship and independent thought with theatre and speech, not to mention music and the visual arts. They are the very wind that fills her sails so that her ship can set sail for new horizons. The only thing that interests her is that openness, that receptiveness, that constant free trade in ideas with the other. A subtle alloy of carnal sensuality and graphic purity, her work is very intriguing and touching.
QUANTUM-QUINTET
BRICE LEROUX (BRUSSELS)QUANTUM-QUINTET
Five dancers are pinned to the floor. Ten forearms loom up in the black night, composing a calligraphy of constantly changing forms, like luminescent particles. It could be said of Brice Leroux that he is a rigorous aesthete mastering a singular poetry of matter. It could also be said that he combines this staggering ability to suspend the audience outside time with the intuitive curiosity of a scientist passionately observing the laws governing the universe.
ROUGE DÉCANTÉ
GUY CASSIERS (ANVERS/ROTTERDAM)ROUGE DÉCANTÉ
Like the book on which it is based, the stage version of Rouge décanté recounts the appalling experience of the writer who as a young child was incarcerated with his mother in a concentration camp near Djakarta during the Japanese occupation. Thirty-five years later she died “unexpectedly” in utter solitude in a nursing home where he had never set foot. The book is a reckoning with his mother. With this powerful monologue, the director Guy Cassiers and the great actor Dirk Roofthooft (who has worked with all the leading lights of Flemish theatre) take us on a journey into the ravaged inner world of Jeroen Brouwers.
SIESTES MUSICALES
ÉTIENNE CHARY (FRANCE)SIESTES MUSICALES
If you happen to be outside Place des Arts during the lunch hour, you might want to catch forty winks as you fall under the musical spell of the enchanting Trous d’eau. That is the name given by the French sound alchemist Étienne Charry to his unusual music of underwater soundscapes that evoke the miniature marine worlds left between the rocks by the outgoing tide. Dozing in deckchairs at the heart of an oasis of greenery nestled in the shadows of the Musée d’art contemporain, you can catch some shut-eye to the sounds of Anémone, Flux de sel or Doigts de Neptune, low-volume melodies emanating from a number of transistor radios dispersed throughout the site like small shellfish strewn on the shore. Étienne Charry distributes them as the spirit moves him and, if so inclined, sometimes adds commentary, deliciously incongruous poetic remarks.
THE ECO SHOW
DANIEL BROOKS (TORONTO)THE ECO SHOW
If the beating of a butterfly’s wings can beget tor- nadoes thousands of miles away, our relationships with our immediate and extended family, as well as our history and memory, are directly linked to our ecosystem. This is certainly the case in the eyes of Daniel Brooks and Chris Abraham.
Umwelt
Maguy Marin (France)Umwelt
Umwelt is a German word meaning environment, surroundings or subjective universe. In the human environment created by Maguy Marin, a never-ending circular dance that she choreographs to the sound of deafening music, an impressive swath of humanity is on parade. Swept along by an incessant wind, men and women move through repetitions, repeated movements and variations, stepping out from behind mirrors and moving, coming and going, appearing and disappearing in a constant to-ing and fro-ing, a perpetuum mobile, until all possibilities are exhausted.
UQQUAQ, L’ABRI
GENEVIÈVE PEPIN (MONTRÉAL / IGLOOLIK)UQQUAQ, L’ABRI
In 1999, Laurentio, a hunter from the Igloolik region in Nunavut who is also a storyteller, actor and Inuit dancer, met Geneviève, the dancer, improviser and performer. Uqquaq, L’Abri(The Shelter) is the tale of a cultural and personal encounter.
