As the house lights came up, I tried to turn and put my coat back on. Instead, I found myself slumped down in my seat with tears streaming down my face. I was sure I had just witnessed a miraculous event. This woman, and her partners, had just defied gravity. They created such energy and emotion without so much as a curl of their lips. These stories I experienced were told through the body; the extreme and exact movement Louise Lecavalier, her partners, and her collaborators create, to evoke curiosity without a verbal command or suggestive facial expression.
“At one point, I actually forced myself to stop watching her and watch her partner [Keir Knight]. He was working hard!” I overheard this comment from an audience member regarding the second piece in Louise Lacavalier/Fou Glorieux double bill Children & A Few Minutes of Lock, presented by Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage.
Lecavalier is truly a mesmerizing performer, but not in the sense where your eyes glaze over and you just fall into a daze. You won’t; she doesn’t let you. Lacavalier dances with the recklessness of a French Canadian dancer and performs with the precision of a soldier. The moment she steps on stage, her energy blares like a fog horn; you can’t miss her. It is as though she sends out all of her energy into the audience, and then pulls it [her energy] back in, to spiral the audience into another captivating sequence of movement.
Known as the muse of Edouard Lock’s La La La Human Steps, Lecavalier is a Canadian contemporary dance icon. Spanning 19 years with Lock’s company, she defined the company’s dazzling physicality and technical precision, and performed in their every creation, including a tour and music video with David Bowie. Upon her departure from La La in 1999, Lacavalier began working as an independent artist, founding her company Fou Glorieux. Her recent collaborations and commissions include Canadian artists Benoît Lachambre, Crystal Pite, and Tedd Robinson.
The first piece Children, choreographed by Nigel Charnock, is an abstraction of two people “plunged into the agony and the ecstasy of trying to stay together for themselves and for their children”, as described by the choreographer. His ideas entertain between animal-like reactions and survival, to pillow talk, to exhaustion, to the feelings of loneliness, loss and holding on. This is all set to a soundtrack of popular songs, eerie operatic tones and a mish-mash of recordings evoking young children communicating. Charnock’s choreography is vibrant and animalistic at first, gestural and fun; it is also wandering, and occasionally, showy and presentational.
I understand the significance of seeing two people struggle or enjoy their situation simultaneously; however, it doesn’t give much depth to the piece if they are looking out towards the audience at the same time. The use of props seems superficial and, while “entertaining” at times, I didn’t feel like the movement indicated enough support for their use, or at least how their uses were explored.
The ending is a strikingly beautiful image, where physicality reigns over emotion. I watched as one dancer tried to hold onto, enliven and embrace the other only to be left with a lifeless, doll-like body in return. It wasn’t until the lights were fading and the couple was slow dancing that I realized what an effect the last physical relationship had on my emotional state. Both Lacavalier and her partner Patrick Lamothe embody such emotional depth, purely through their physicality, that I felt their struggle in that last moment twist up inside me like knots in my stomach.
Lacavalier dives and wrestles her way across the stage with such direction that I can only begin to imagine the map of choreography she had laid out in her head. And in that, her partners, both male, must also be commended, as they follow her and support her every move. This is particularly evident in A Few Minutes of Lock, where Lacavalier propels her body through space and her partner, Keir Knight, catches her... every time. The work is purely physical and absolutely exact.
The lighting suggests that the audience is meant to see the body and dynamics of the limbs and torso, as opposed to the person inside of the dance, as the dancers’ are back lit for half of the piece. Even when the light shines onto their faces, their expressions are neutral, giving attention to the form, the technique and direction of bodies in space. Lacavalier is a master of these elements. Her decision to revisit these excerpts from Lock’s work is clearly defined in the program notes, as her “wish to discover what the body remembers or doesn’t remember, to know what memory has let go, flattened, or embellished”.
Dance is a fleeting art, asking the body to experience a muscular movement in the exact same way each time, with the same emotional response. While a dancer trains to perform this way, the task is almost impossible. As the body ages, so does the method of the physicality in the work. Since the body is the tool, the work is ever-changing, even if the steps stay the same. This is what makes dance, and it’s performer, so precious and rare. In A Few Minutes of Lock Lacavalier is revisiting the work that ignited her career and defined her as a performer. Known for her quick, precise movement and flying-horizontal barrel rolls in Lock’s work, it is probably as satisfying to perform the work, again, as it is for her audience to watch Lacavalier in it.
Children & A Few Minutes of Lock runs April 13-16, 2011 at Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage. Louise Lacavalier/Fou Glorieux will continue to tour across Canada and throughout Europe this year.
Read more!
Louise Lacavalier/Fou Glorieux: A Response by Krista Posyniak
Dispatches: Is You Me by Benoît Lachambre, Louise Lecavalier, and Laurent Goldring, Festival Transamériques, Montreal
One of the things I often find frustrating about the integration of dance and video is that the artists often don't take full advantage of the possibilities available by merging the two forms-- namely creating a genuine interaction between them. Dancers have a degree of precision in their training that allows them to interact with prerecorded images in a way that actors simply cannot, which is why I always find it maddening when choreographers employ video simply as a visual backdrop for their work, rather than an integrated element of the performance. Is You Me is an ideal example of how to work with these two forms together. Far from being a simple background for the action, the video design in this piece is truly integrated with the movement to the degree that you occasionally forget you are watching dance, and start to feel like you are watching a computerized video projection in which the dancers are shapes being drawn along with the rest of the images. It's fitting that Goldring is credited as co-creator along with Lachambre and Lecavalier, as his design for the piece functions like a third dancer on stage. The all white space and deceptively simple set design brings the dancers and the projected images into the same visual plane and allows for a whole series of simple but brilliant trompe-l'oeil's in which their bodies are morphed, turned inside out, and wrestled into one visual paradox after another. Lecavalier is perhaps best known as the blonde-dreadlocked power house who danced with La La La Human Steps for eighteen years. Along with choreographer Édouard Lock, she helped develop that company's lighting-fast choreographic aesthetic and is maybe best known for her signature "barrel jump" (think pirouette turned sideways) one of the great defining images associated with the company. Now, nine years after leaving La La, she's turned her efforts to exploring a slower style of movement. She says in the program notes that speed and slowness are similar in that they both can indicate a lack of connection with our primal driving forces, though when pushed to the extreme they can transform our perceptions and relationships to time and our own bodies. Lest I make it sound like the choreography resonates with some kind of Butoh-like glaciality, I should be clear that both Lechambre and Lecavalier (who turns fifty this year!) both move fast, though there's a greater contrast between fast and slow movement than she was known for in the past. It's amazing to see someone who has had such an incredible career with one of the best known international dance companies in 
Is You Me, the new collaboration between
Developed over the last two years, in collaboration with video artist Laurent Goldring, and musician Hahn Rowe, the work consists of the two dancers on an all white stage, in the midst of a kinetic, colourful, and visually riotous series of video projections. Abstract in nature, the projections appear to be composed live (though the program notes indicate they are prerecorded) and resemble a drawing created in a simple computer program like Microsoft Paint. Lines are drawn around and across the dancers' bodies. Spaces are filled with colour and imitate human forms, animals, and objects, though the way they are rendered every image is suggestive, rather than concrete.