If there were a yearbook made for Quebec’s next wave of dance, choreographer Virginie Brunelle might be named ‘Most Likely To Succeed’.  With her third and latest full-length work, Complexe des genres, 29-year-old Brunelle cements her local darling status and confirms her talents as a serious dancemaker destined for bigger stages.  Complexe des genres received its world premiere at Théâtre La Chapelle on September 6.

A non-narrative sextet for three women and three men, Complexe des genres moves beyond the battle of the sexes to explore the awkward and often desperate scene of human coupling.  The hour-long series of movement tableaus containing mostly duets, but also solos, trios and group scenes, opens with a salient image: Three sets of hybrid bodies – pelvic-thrusting male lower halves and bare female upper halves rising out of tutus – as they rock and flail on the floor.  An incoherent, troublesome fit.

Romance is tenuous in Complexe des genres, although longing and vulnerability, absolute.  To a melancholic playlist of classical music hits spanning Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Max Richter and Phillip Glass, dancers try to connect on a barren stage.  After getting hot and heavy around an unwieldy chair (an unsatisfactory encounter), lumberjack-like Luc Bouchard-Boissonneault and leggy Claudine Hébert put their inner struggles on display, unabashed by the slapping of skin or the boney thud of their landings.  Their dancing alternately sensual and calloused, sustained and syncopated, the pair heave, grab and fling their way through demanding lifts and turns, quoting ballet and swing dance moves but with none of the easy clichés about men and women.  At various points, both show their fists and fatigue.

Male-female relationships being a recurring subject in Brunelle’s work, partnering is also her primary choreographic vehicle, and its instances reveal her craft at its most refined.  Even without the maudlin soundtrack, Brunelle knows how to use rhythm and repetition to build emotional resonance in movement.  One passage featuring loose-maned Frédéric Tavernini and compact Isabelle Arcand has him guide her undulating body as it seeks the floor, letting her momentarily writhe out just above it, only to send her surging back up to vertical.  Repeated three times and sped up incrementally, the short phrase gathers myriad colors.

Virginie Brunelle’s choreographic career has been on a fast track ever since she graduated from UQAM’s Dance Department in 2007.  She got her first full-length work, Les cuisses à l’écart du coeur (2008), noticed by the influential local choreographer Dave St-Pierre, and went on to tour the piece, as well as her second, Foutrement (2009), across Europe.  Brunelle’s highly physical, flesh-baring works betray a distinct Quebec contemporary dance pedigree, and yet with her textured, pure movement palette she stands out on a local scene increasingly trending towards multidisciplinary performance.

In Complexe des genres, Brunelle proves she doesn’t need the provocative nudity of her previous pieces to strip her dancers down.  The rawest scene, quite wonderful, is a quiet trio of undulating men.  Their thick, damp chests bared, Tavernini, Bouchard-Boissonneault and Simon-Xavier Lefebvre step soft-footedly together around the stage, eyes closed and bodies lapping rhythmically at the empty space.  When they pick up their heels in unison, vulnerability emanates.

Ever-present in the piece is the materiality of the body, to which Brunelle’s brand of realism is irrevocably tied.  In a punishing solo, Sophie Breton repeatedly hurls herself knee-and-shin-first into the floor (cringe).  When Hébert emerges to mirror her, except accompanied by two supportive male partners, Breton’s crashing becomes all the more violent, visceral.  She seals her suffering in a plank position, pushing up from her forearms to her palms, then her fists, then fingertips.

Despite a forgettable, feel-good ending, Complexe des genres is a solid dance work in which Brunelle demonstrates, with formalistic flair, a developing personal style of edgy idiosyncrasy, multidirectional movement, jagged rhythmic texture and gestural motifs (fists pressing into the ground, into mouths, unfurling to the side) that often stick.  Audiences can have high hopes for this young local talent.

Complexe des genres opens the 2011-2012 season at Théâtre La Chapelle and runs Sept. 6-17 at 8pm.  Tickets and information: http://lachapelle.org/

After a four-year wait since Édouard Lock’s last creation, hyped-up Montreal dancegoers streamed into Salle Wilfrid Pelletier on Thursday night for the North American premiere of Lock’s New Work, featuring international ballet star Diana Vishneva.

For well over a decade now, Quebec’s most famous choreographer has been developing an obsessive idiom of high-speed, deconstructed ballet, thrilling some and leaving others cold. New Work finally draws blood from the stone, and is Lock’s most affecting ballet of his post-Louise Lecavalier era.

Drawing musical and thematic inspiration from the operas Dido and Aeneas (Purcell) and Orpheus and Eurydice (Gluck), the 85-minute piece is danced without intermission by 11 members of La La La Human Steps – Lock’s Montreal company that celebrates its 30th anniversary this year – and guest artist Diana Vishneva, the Kirov Ballet’s biggest star. Joining them onstage are three musicians – a cellist, violist and saxophonist – performing an original score by long-time Lock collaborator Gavin Bryars.

On the offset there is nothing radically new about New Work. Lock’s dancers are still minimally-lit and dressed in black; women on pointe are maneuvered and spun at dizzying speeds; dancers dart in and out of spotlit partnering; video projections intervene periodically. In the new piece, however, Lock’s language of repetitious, rapid-fire partnering and wild gestural tics achieve an expressive range unseen in previous works like 2002’s Amélia and 2007’s Amjad. New Work finally gives its audience more to look at than sheer virtuosity, velocity and aesthetic chic (a potion that has been proven to numb the brain in 15 minutes).

Flame-haired Talia Evtushenko, partnered by several of the company’s industrious men, is a taut cyclone of flurrying arms, flicking wrists and pricking legs. She seems to rail against her wordlessness, shaking her head no, shooting both open hands beyond her partner’s head time and time again. She travels urgently from one statuesque female cast member to the next, though they seem walled up in their own arm-flapping and face-powdering, hovering stoically on pointe. In another phrase, as Jason Shipley-Holmes clutches Evtushenko’s tiny waist, pressing her forward only to tug her right back, she kicks her legs furiously behind her – Stop, I’m trying to tell you something.

Kirov Ballet star Vishneva does not steal the show but contributes some fine regal presence to her duets – luxuriously-unfolding développés, sharply-placed head positions, a dramatically swooping penché on pointe. Mi Deng is yet another persona in her couplings, seeming baffled as she watches Shipley-Holmes manipulate her dumbed leg like some kind of paddle.

Lock’s New Work makes no attempts at narrative and yet its finest moments produce a dramatic residue that calls elliptically, faintly at the themes of its Greek and Latin source material. And not just the tragic love lost part. Diego Castro and Kai Zhang dance side-by-side engulfed in shadows, a dim spotlight picking up only their maniacally fraying outlines. Our eyes go fuzzy trying to make out the action, and pretty soon we resign to the painterly etchings of light as they flit and evaporate – this is imagery of the mind’s eye, this is the restless realm of memory, dreams.

New Work does have plenty of dull passages and an unnecessarily recurring video projection (the swirling inside of an eyeball?). But for a choreographer who previously seemed limited by new-found aesthetic and technical obsessions, this piece suggests his formalist movement ideas have poetic scope and are, despite appearances, far from monotone. Lock and his excellent company, featuring veterans like Jason Shipley-Holmes and Zofia Tujaka along with a batch of talented newcomers, have by now mechanized the signature partnering technique to a point of staggering speed and precision. In New Work, Lock has begun to revel in more intimate and evocative gestural detail, wider-ranging dynamics (softer lifts, lingering angles) and a heightened sense of musicality.

So yes, Édouard Lock is still doing the ballet-on-fast-forward thing, and his next piece should be even more highly-anticipated than this current one.

New Work premiered in Amsterdam in January. The final performance of its Montreal run is tonight, 8 pm at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, Place des Arts. For those unable to make the performance, there will be an Ottawa run at the National Arts Centre, May 18-19.

Louise Lecavalier’s ropy musculature, punk androgyny and ballistic barrel rolls defined Édouard Lock’s choreographic signature for nearly two decades. Now, 12 years after retiring as the platinum-maned icon of his company La La La Human Steps, Lecavalier still astonishes as a dancer of rare and singular presence; a force of nature, simply. Children + A Few Minutes of Lock, a double program at Usine C of duets by Nigel Charnock and Édouard Lock, is an opportunity to witness the legendary talents of Quebec’s rebel queen of contemporary dance.

2009‘s Children is the opening piece, a 50-minute duet by British choreographer Nigel Charnock featuring former O Vertigo dancer Patrick Lamothe alongside Lecavalier. Set to a jukebox soundtrack shuffling tunes by Leonard Cohen, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Miles Davis, Puccini and others, the work vaguely narrates the arc of a couple’s life – innocence and play turn to frustration and fatigue, and through physical labours they try to keep it all together. A few times they play fight with staffs (when is this ever supposed to be suitable for serious choreography?), gulp water and toss the bottles, wrestle with pillows and drape the emptied cases over their heads.

In the end Children is dramatically slight but still engrossing as stage time for Lecavalier. Her attack is sharp and swift, her jumps full and her landings precise, ready for rebound. She handles fast changes in direction as if it were her sport, runs and hurls herself repeatedly into her partner’s arms as if to dislocate his shoulder and mow down the first few rows of spectators. Poor Lamothe is visibly overpowered, outpaced and outlasted by Lecavalier, resulting in some impressively profuse sweating and their physical synergy coming loose by the end.

Kier Knight, Lecavalier’s partner in the Édouard Lock excerpts, fares better. A former dancer with La La La, his tall stature and attentive, endless arms offer better traction for her torpedo force. The final 15 minutes of the program consist of three duets taken from the last Édouard Lock pieces in which Lecavalier danced: 2 (1995) and Exaucé/Salt (1998). In revisiting them we see the choreographies still fit her like a glove.

Thrashing her platinum-blond locks, Lecavalier glows bright under the lights wearing only a tank top, knee-pads and thigh-baring shorts. Knight’s manipulations are obscured by baggy black clothing, but this is fine, as his presence is about utmost industriousness. In these pieces we see Lecavalier illuminated and revelling in her element; she is a total 360-degree natural barrelling through the air on every axis. In a frantic state of launching and falling with ragdoll abandon, she is permanently awake and maintains absolute precision in the way she hits or misses the ground, anticipates her partner’s bracing support. But it is not just the spiky, high-risk manoeuvres that impress; the way she enters and exits them with serene insouciance is equally all her own.

Watching Louise Lecavalier dancing Édouard Lock’s choreography is to glimpse into the artist-muse archetype at rare proximity. The two began to collaborate in the late 70’s during the creative pressure cooker years of Le Groupe Nouvelle Aire, the seminal Montreal company from which emerged many of Quebec “nouvelle danse” luminaries. Lecavalier is the embodiment of Lock’s early iconoclasm – raw, unrelenting, both strikingly idiosyncratic and neutral – and offers trap-door insights into his life’s work. Even in his current, decidedly ballet-obsessed mode, Lock still makes use of a task-like, toneless cool at blistering speeds. Revisiting Lecavalier’s barrage of horizontal barrel jumps, at once thrilling and numbing, sheds sudden light on the pirouetting ballerina drills on pointe that so dominate Lock’s recent productions.

Lock being very resistant to reproducing old work, these excerpts from 2 and Exaucé/Salt are fascinating documents that contain the early and transitional DNA of the Lock aesthetic we recognize today. Montreal audiences will get a chance to see his long-awaited latest creation with La La La Human Steps on May 5 at Place des Arts.

Finally, did I mention that Louise Lecavalier will be turning 53 this year? That she is dancing on an artificial hip? No, because it hardly matters at all. Lecavalier is potent and indefatigable as ever, as her audiences and dance partners can all attest to.

Fou Glorieux is the company Lecavalier founded in 2006 as a vehicle for her collaborations with select choreographers that to date include Benoît Lachambre and Crystal Pite. Children + A Few Minutes of Lock opened April 27 at Usine C and runs through April 30. For tickets and information: www.usine-c.com.

Dubbed by critics as the current rock star of international ballet, 40-year-old British dancemaker Wayne McGregor is leaving more than just his dancers breathless. With a high-speed, wholly distinctive movement language and commissions by the world’s leading companies piled high, Britain’s top contemporary choreographer definitely has his mojo in full swing.

McGregor makes his hotly-awaited Montreal debut at Théâtre Maisonneuve as part of the 2010-2011 Danse Danse season with his London-based company Wayne McGregor/Random Dance and his hit piece from 2008, Entity.

Entity is a two-part abstract dance for ten performers set to original music by Joby Talbot (dissonant classical with cello) and Jon Hopkins (big beat electronica). A steady stream of solos, duets and group scenes unfold amidst three moveable walls upon which grainy black-and-white videos – mostly vague floating forms and a greyhound running – are sometimes projected. Sleek-bodied dancers wear black mini-shorts and white tank tops in the first half; men are bare-chested and women strip down to black bras in the second. Just another day in European contemporary dance, really.

But Entity’s true centrepiece is McGregor’s sophisticated stage sense and his signature movement style full of shimmering gestural detail. Frenetic yet laser-precise articulations of the body pushing physical extremes recalls the later work of ballet deconstructor William Forsythe – zipping up and unzipping the body’s lines along careening axles and with uncommon rhythmic nuance – and yet McGregor adds a tactile dimension that is wholly his own.

With backs overarched and ribcages unhinged, arms undulating like electric flagella and hands alive like alien sensory nodes – ever-alert, curling, unfurling, lashing energy all the way through the fingertips, McGregor’s classically-trained dancers spell through space with sinuous, gulping bravura, exploring the maximum exposed surface area of their bodies and the outer edges of flexibility.

While the choreography maintains the same viscerally maxed-out, high-velocity register throughout its 60-minutes – a kinetic onslaught that does numb a bit by the second half, McGregor’s skill with spatial organization keeps the fine details of his work popping. Where space might shrink or lose its clarity during complex group passages on another choreographer’s watch, here McGregor creates great moving textures on stage that activate the eye, forcing it to travel and shift between hard and soft focus.

A moment in Entity’s busy landscape can contain both static-y patches of whipping limbs and glowing points of stillness, lifts in subtle dialogue with low cantilevered bodies elsewhere – strong counterpoints reminiscent of Merce Cunningham’s multi-(or anti-) focal stage.

Wayne McGregor founded his company Wayne McGregor/Random Dance in 1992 at the young age of 22 and sent shockwaves through the dance community in 2006 by becoming the first ever contemporary choreographer to be appointed Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet. Known for his collaborations across the visual arts and sciences as well as for his use of new technology, McGregor’s highly sought-after creations already feature in the repertories of the world’s greatest companies – Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, Nederlands Dans Theater I, San Francisco Ballet, Australian Ballet, New York City Ballet, and an upcoming 2011 commission for Bolshoi Ballet.

Entity’s latter half devolves into a bass-throbbing, oddly-sensual club atmosphere, losing some of its clean movement formalism and idiosyncrasy to Latin ballroom flair and socket-busting legs inspired to whack and hook even higher. However, these more accessible devices – showy virtuosity and sleekly-styled couplings backed by massive electronic beats – might simply be appreciated for the gut-rousing, propulsive energy they harness. In this respect Entity reminds of last year’s Danse Danse season opener, another acclaimed British choreographer and theatre-packer, Hofesh Shechter, whose walloping, high-decibel recipe for popular appeal cannot be ignored in a field that so often struggles, or forgets, to reach wider audiences.

Entity runs at Théâtre Maisonneuve through tonight, wrapping up its three-city Canadian tour. Visit Danse danse for more information.

Montreal’s biggest dance theatre festival, Festival TransAmériques, asserts itself among the city’s slew of summer events with a hearty, adventurous fourth edition with several exceptional dance offerings.

The Festival’s opener alone is an historical must-see: the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s sole Canadian date as they make their final world tour following the great choreographer’s passing last July. As stipulated in the company’s legacy plan, the troupe will disband indefinitely on New Year’s Eve 2011.

Whether or not one enjoys Cunningham’s work is quite besides the point, and always has been. The visionary American choreographer, who died last year at the age of 90, ranks alongside Martha Graham and George Balanchine as one of 20th century dance’s defining innovators. Cunningham’s revolutionary experiments with chance procedures, his famous collaborations with composer John Cage radically divorcing dance from music, and later, his site-specific dance “Events” and his pioneering work with computer-generated movement and film trace the astonishing career, spanning almost 70 years, of a modernist giant. His piece Nearly 90², which premiered last year in New York as a celebration of his 90th birthday, will be presented at Théâtre Maisonneuve May 27 and 28 and is stunning evidence of a master artist who continued to invent until the end.

Also on the bill this year are two exciting contemporary African programs, both North American premieres, to be presented at Usine C. Congolese dancer, choreographer and rising international star Faustin Linyekula will perform, alongside two dancers and an onstage band, his explosive choreographic concert More more more … Future. Then, hailing from Ouagadougou, veteran choreographers Salia Sanou and Seydou Boro will present Poussières de Sang, a shattering, exorcistic movement piece that puts on full display the visceral styles of new West African dance.

Another irrefutable FTA highlight is the return, after a 10-year absence from Montreal stages, of acclaimed Japanese dancer, choreographer and visual artist Saburo Teshigawara. Renowned for his otherworldly sense of imagery and mesmerizing, liquid movement style, Teshigawara will perform his solo Miroku, a chiaroscuro work contemplating harmony in conflicting states.

FTA’s 2010 roster of Quebec artists includes Ginette Laurin and her company O Vertigo, performing the world premiere of Onde de choc; a collaboration between the prolific, unpredictable Benoît Lachambre and music and dance artist Clara Furey in Chutes incandescentes; a double program featuring the incomparable Louise Lecavalier, famous muse of Édouard Lock; and the highly-anticipated return of Montreal’s resident enfant terrible Frédérick Gravel with the world premiere of another work of signature irreverence, Tout se pète la gueule, chérie.

And last but not least, back by popular demand is Sylvain Émard’s irresistible free outdoor block party, Le grand continental, when some hundred amateur dancers will crowd Émilie Gamelin Square in one massive groove for the masses.

In a city of gridlocked festivals, Festival TransAmériques and its consistently world-class programming is one of Montreal’s most ambitious and admirable events. Last year’s edition was a sell-out high; let’s see how it fares this year as it now goes head-to-head with the Spectra blockbuster Les FrancoFolies, which was moved from August to June.

Festival TransAmériques’s 17 days of performances, meet-the-artist events, films and parties take place at venues across town. The festival runs from May 27 to June 12. Visit their site for schedules, ticket information and video clips of performances.

Photo: Clara Furey.

Just when you thought the age of bad post-modern titles was really, really over, veteran Canadian choreographer Christopher House returns to the Danse Danse series with Dis/(sol/ve)r, a recent work for Toronto Dance Theatre. The name is misleading, puzzling even (as is the involvement of a dramaturge), because the hour-long dance is an exceedingly legible and earnest look at how people orbit, bond and inevitably disappear on one another. But what else is new? The choreography begs the same question.

Dis/(sol/ve)r features five men and four women in smart cocktail party dress, barefoot. The set by Cheryl Lalonde is handsome, a half-stage pastel backdrop of gently-wrinkled tissue paper panels, hung. Instrumental music by Phil Strong is choreography friendly, offering some mischief, some rhythmic parts, and plenty of bittersweet moments to accompany the searching looks between dancers.

The piece alternates mainly between group sections evoking social scenes and male-female duets indicating different kinds of couples or moments in a couple’s life. The former is the more rewarding. House’s reported penchant for particle theory and quantum mechanics reveals itself in these ensemble sections, as dancers weave and propel around in unpredictable patterns, skittering, leaping and walking multi-directionally with gazes interlocked. This is a departure from House’s much-lauded use of unison or canon but shows he still excels at arranging his dancers on stage. Charged-up molecules or planets drifting, performers are self-contained and yet ruled by some collective force that returns them to precise docking points. Another recurring exercise has the dancers linked in a chain, a kind of tough-to-wrangle social dance that is probably more fun to improvise than it is to watch.

Although the founders of Toronto Dance Theatre were trained at the Martha Graham school, House, its Artistic Director since 1994 and Resident Choreographer since 1981, culls from a mixed contemporary tradition that calls to mind the falling weight of Jose Limon, the strict upper body, awkward pivots and heavy jumps of Merce Cunningham, and especially in this piece, the pedestrian, untrained movement of Judson Church experimentalists like Deborah Hay. What is lacking in Dis/(sol/ve)r, however, is the simultaneous freedom and deep rigor that made ordinary movement so radical in New York in the 60’s and 70’s.

Stripped of House’s usual props and video, Dis/(sol/ve)r invites a closer look at the movement itself. Here, House’s language is gesture rich and at times very quirky, with a lot of attention to the arms and hands, but despite a conscientious use of phrasing and repetition, meaning rarely bubbles up, images do not stick. It doesn’t help that the choreography sometimes resorts to clichés like unreciprocated hugging, or even worse, a dancer slapping himself in the face; the theatrical elements are poorly integrated and one wonders why suddenly there are facial expressions or bouts of cruel gender games like a vanilla version of Pina Bausch.

There are successful passages, however, and the most poignant involves one dancer going in to cradle the head of another, only to have his or her object disintegrate into the floor, leaving an empty embrace. The phenomenon ripples through the group as dancers disappear on each other and resurrect, only to experience the same loss from another. The simple gesture and its myriad suggestions is the middle C of the entire piece.

The company has recently renewed itself with a batch of new dancers, but the result is a less-than-cohesive whole. The men are citizen-like, uneven technically but nonetheless channel a realness that is useful to House’s choreography; the girls on the other hand, while more polished, often betray lyrical jazz manners (think So You Think You Can Dance) and seem to want to point their toes and flick their hair any chance they get. For the time being, this mini-society does not quite sell itself.

House gets high appreciation marks for being one of Canada’s most seasoned and skilled dancemakers. Dis/(sol/ve)r is a thoughtful departure from his busier pieces; it is not, however, the work that marks a veteran choreographer drawing innovation from existing formulas at large.

(Footnote: To all choreographers who still feel the need to over-punctuate their titles, a polite reminder that William Forsythe made ALIE/N A(C)TION in 1992. It’s time to move on.)

Dis/(sol/ve)r closes the 2009-2010 season of Danse Danse. The last performance is tonight at Centre Pierre-Péladeau, 8pm. For more details visit the Danse Danse site.

There is probably no living European choreographer more internationally beloved than Jiri Kylián. His non-narrative, dramatic ballets blending classical technique and modern expressionism are season favourites and repertory mainstays of established companies around the world. Les Grands Ballets Canadiens presents three of the influential Czech choreographer’s works in its Soirée Kylián at Théâtre Maisonneuve.

Kylián, whose 30-year creative residence at Nederlands Dans Theater led the Dutch company to international renown, is not known for the movement invention or formal experiments that defined the careers of peers like William Forsythe. Kylián’s signature, rather, is a singularly eloquent neo-classical style – lyrical, expressionistic and marked by a deep humanist concern.

NDT was the first European ballet company to institute a regular modern dance class, and Les Grands Ballets, with its mixed roster of dancers trained in classical and contemporary idioms, are well-suited to his movement style.

The program opener, Symphony of Psalms, is an early Kylián classic from 1978 that exemplifies the mesmerizing choral movement and use of deep space that are the choreographer’s trademark. Against a backdrop tapestry of oriental rugs and two framing rows of wooden chairs, 16 dancers soberly dressed in charcoal and pallid hues rush and plow against the full-blooded, dark liturgy of Stravinsky’s score. They travel urgently together in kaleidoscopic patterns, falling into strict lines, splintering into pairs or cascading their movements across the stage’s full dimensions.

The men are steely and efficient, while the women, as in many of Kylián’s works, are potent expressions of existential conflict: exaltation and grief, piousness and sensual abandon, heaven and earth. Voluptuous curves compete with sharp angles in their bodies; razor-straight legs shoot vectors far into space, only to be broken and pulled inward by a torso contracted, a foot flexed. One moment, penitent, the women tread forward with heads bowed, midsections curled and arms outstretched with palms and wrists exposed. The next, they hurl themselves over the men like rushing water over a precipice. The ensemble piece lasts 25 minutes and contains all the kinetic and spiritual thrust of Kylián’s standout early works.

Bella Figura, second on the bill, is the evening’s most nuanced and expansive piece and offers some of the best instances of Kylián’s supreme musicality and visually sumptuous partnering. Created in 1995 with music by Lukas Foss, G.B. Pergolesi, Alessandro Marcello, Antonio Vivaldi and Giuseppe Torelli, the ballet sets four couples and one woman in dream-like sequences cut and framed by moving curtains. Here Kylián’s fluid, neo-classical style is inflected with idiosyncratic wit, bouts of improvisation and a rich gestural language – small flicks of the leg, shoulders stuck in shrugged positions, hips flirtatiously jutted, hands softly quivering.

Unlike some contemporary ballet choreographers like Christopher Wheeldon who continue to have the boys move the girls around like furniture, Kylián creates complex trios and duets that are possible only through smooth-as-butter connectivity between partners and an egalitarian dialogue of force and surrender. No wonder this feels like real romance. Women and men lift, buttress and provide counterweight for each other, creating miraculous moving sculptures that redefine how bodies can interlace.

The first casts of Symphony and Bella work hard and attentively, and Émilie Durville and Robin Mathes each at times achieved the kind of sustained, through-the-body movement that makes the choreography’s technical challenges disappear into emotional depth.

The program closes on a jocular note with the irresistible audience favourite, Sechs Tänze, from 1986. The energetic burlesque set to Mozart’s Six German Dances follows the antics of eight chalk-faced, powder-wigged, very bird-brained aristocrats as they bobble and flounce around in their undergarments. Occasionally, headless black crinolines zip by on wheels. There is a critique of frivolousness to be found here, but for now we are content enough to delight in its froth. Ye Li and Lénaig Guégan turn in revelatory comic performances.

Kylián has made over 100 dances since 1970, and the fine craftsmanship, expressive range and awesomely accessible beauty of his works make Kylián programs some of the best recurring events in dance.

Soirée Kylián opened on March 18 at Théâtre Maisonneuve and continues through this Saturday. Information and tickets at the Place des Arts site or at the box office.

In-the-know North American audiences do not miss an opportunity to see a Meg Stuart work, and her latest Do Animals Cry reminds why. Making their first Montreal appearance in over four years, Stuart’s Belgium-based company Damaged Goods goes to the volatile core of private family life to wrestle out two hours of visceral, unruly physical theatre.

Based since 1994 in Brussels, American choreographer Meg Stuart’s collaborative, genre-eclipsing performance works have made her a key ringleader of Europe’s dance avant garde. Do Animals Cry, created in 2009, finds her teaming up again with two of her favourite collaborators, German stage designer Doris Dziersk and New York-based composer Hahn Rowe, who contributes another signature ambient electronica sound score.

Stuart’s works are known for their evocative, architectural sets, and Do Animals Cry does not disappoint. The six-person movement play revolves around an imposing beaver dam structure that tunnels across the stage. It gets climbed over and upon, raced through and along, blocked up with junk; its myriad suggestions of wilderness, privacy, of insiders and outsiders are vivid. A family of humans in their natural habitat, quiet now as we watch!

From the stage’s opening darkness issue faint giggles, shuffling and dubious panting, before the six performers are caught by the lights in awkwardly joined positions, pyjama-clad. It is immediately known: We have trespassed upon.

Do Animals Cry is a stylish, coded and ultimately frank work that in its delivery captures all the discomfort and tragicomic voyeurism of walking into a family scene not one’s own. After introducing themselves by nickname (both affectionate and cruel versions), the family members continue seemingly from where they left off, confused in their roles but tackling them anyhow, with a few switcheroos. Familial encounters border on violence and eroticism: Smothering mother, jealous son, rivalling brothers, repressed daughter, flirtatious siblings, darkly stoic father.

Family members grab at, charm and manipulate each other with wild caprice, the quickie entanglements tending to cool or sour quickly. Kids and parents are systematically left out or sent to the doghouse (another set piece); some rebel or get even. Although largely derived from improvisation techniques, Stuart’s fleshy movement idiom is nonetheless stylized and given to vigorous, diaphragm-rocking convulsions, ragdoll limbs and wrenching contortions particularly of the torso. Partnering and floorwork is scrappy, sweaty, and rightly justifies the multiple costume changes.

The work’s most affecting scenes drill a pipeline into the awkward, fleeting moments of family life to mine its poignant, rough-edged truths. A suicidally boring dinner table routine is frozen into a series of candid photos (outtakes from the official album, to be sure), the elements of which – a sneaking glance, a misplaced hand, a head coyly tilted – take on Renaissance symbolism. Later, the whole family stands by sheepishly as the new dog, a prize for a neglected child, but also a taxidermic specimen, fails to play fetch. Painfully stretched out, the vignette is a brilliant tragicomic high.

As in the work of many convinced artists, Do Animals Cry could use some editing, as the piece persists past several (perfectly good) false endings and clocks in at over two hours, with no intermission. Extraordinarily committed and connected performances by Joris Camelin, Alexander Jenkins, Adam Linder, Anja Muller, Kotomi Nishiwaki and Frank Willens, however, keep us concerned. Wallflower Nishiwaki surprises at the end with a magnificent tantrum.

Stuart is a rigorously conceptual artist with a recipe that works, a penetrating eye for human behaviour and the restraint to never spell out its secrets. Do Animals Cry proves she is still on her game.

Photo credit: Chris Van der Burght

Do Animals Cry continues through tomorrow at Usine C. For tickets and information, 514-521-4493. Or visit the Usine C site.

Disclaimer: roadkill is actually, seriously scary. Cinematic horror is not the most popular choreographic pursuit, but collaborative Brisbane-based company Splintergroup suggests it’s a frontier in contemporary dance worth visiting. With roadkill, their dance theatre thriller set in Australia’s mythic outback, Splintergroup makes its Montreal debut to conclude Cinquième Salle’s three-part Australian dance series.

There’s no shame in a good set-up: Dead of night. A red gravel-pocked jalopy that won’t start. A young couple (Gavin Webber and Gabrielle Nankivell) stranded. A flickering phone booth, line dead. A scruffy plaid-shirted stranger (Grayson Millwood) with a knack for sudden entrances. And all the while, the paranoia-drenched desolation of the bush. Great.

roadkill is more evidence of contemporary choreographers’ preoccupation with the cinematic. Created in 2007, the dance play takes B-rate psychological thriller fare and runs it through a Lynchian, nonlinear narrative – quite a different challenge for the stage – to harrowing effect. The plot becomes impossible to follow as it starts tripping out on its own fear factor. But high cinematic effects anchor the work and keep us hooked: frantic flashlight searching; footfalls in the dark; smoking, crashed cars; a mysterious hailstorm of white gravel.

Though the suspense-building drags at times, the mise-en-scène has shining moments that beat the movies, like when the stranger first appears and Nankivell is left alone in the car as the men confront each other outside. Because only the inside of the car is miked, their exchange is vague and muted, and our perspective is as trapped as hers. All there is is the girl’s breathing, growing heavy as she gives herself over to panic and claustrophobia. No, don’t get out! we telepath.

Danced passages, neatly arranged into solos and duets, explore the characters’ psychic worlds and add the piece’s third dimension. A window into their inner lives, the choreography works best when movement and poetic image converge to produce human portrait. In Nankivell’s first duet with Webber, she grasps drowsily, but insistently, at the surrounding space thick as sap. She tries to waft away, he tightens his grip; when she reaches skyward, he presses her hands and shoulders back down. She stays submerged.

In its more revved-up registers, the piece’s movement style borrows heavily from the signature high-risk, ballistic techniques of Belgian innovator Wim Vandekeybus, for whom Webber and Nankivell both danced. Go-for-broke barrel jumps, big spills and bruising knee drops all come in handy, for example, when the three decide to hurl themselves repeatedly on, off and against the (poor) Toyota. While flame-tressed Nankivell is particularly gutsy in her performance, movement invention is unremarkable as a whole when compared to the work’s very novel-feeling evocation of horror.

roadkill creators Webber, Millwood and Sarah-Jayne Howard (replaced in these performances by Nankivell) met as company members of the renowned Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre in the 90’s. Tankard, a longtime performer with Pina Bausch, along with compatriots such as Lloyd Newsom (of London-based DV8 Physical Theatre), Gideon Obarzanek (Chunky Move) and Garry Stewart (Australian Dance Theatre), have been seminal figures in what has emerged in recent years as a brand of dynamic dance theatre distinctly Australian. Its young collectives like Splintergroup and Kate Champion’s Force Majeure, who opened this Australia series last October, are exciting troupes indeed and Cinquième Salle has scored a coup in tapping them. Next up … Sweden?

Splintergroup made their Montreal debut at Cinquième Salle on Wednesday, February 10 and will perform roadkill through February 13, with two shows on Saturday. Check the Cinquième Salle site for information and tickets, (514) 842-2112 or the Place des Arts box office.

Auteur cinema does not put us in a resting, gaping state; beer commercials do. French-Austrian performance group Superamas explores the straight-to-the-bloodstream effects of mass media by producing a freshly-squeezed concentrate from the familiar pulp of romantic comedies, soap operas, commercials and music videos.

The company makes its Canadian debut at Usine C with their hour-long multimedia dance theatre work BIG 3rd episode (happy/end), presented as part of the Festival Temps d’Images.

The piece unfolds in alternating scenes occurring both onstage, with seven principal actor-musician-dancers moving between three sets, and on-screen in pre-recorded videos, with additional cast, projected above.

The onstage plotlines are deliberately trite but so rigorously tone-steady that they never rest long in satire. Two theatrical devices are at work here: First, dialogue is not delivered live but lip-synched by the actors over a pre-recorded track. Then, each scene is played, frozen and replayed multiple times, dissolving the immediacy of comic and dramatic effect and affording a longer, harder look.

The first on-stage vignette features four shirtless dudes in jeans during band practice, their cover of Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” interrupted by one member’s confession of an extramarital one-night-stand. Nice, bro! But wait. Now the girl is pregnant, what to do? The guys crack open some beers and pause to glug meaningfully.

In the brief second, a club dance floor lights up and suddenly crowds with sloppy college gyrating. Two girls emerge, manifest an unspoken rivalry by whipping out their best (bad) dance moves and end, of course, in a dance-off: High kick, pirouette, chest pump, hair flip, drop into the splits! Beat that! In the next scene, the same girls meet again in the changing room of a posh gym. Now with a third girlfriend, they gossip about their sex lives, trade veiled remarks and endlessly derobe. No surprise that this last sequence was inspired by an episode of Sex and the City.

Superamas is an amoebic, ‘Do-It-Yourself’ dance theatre collective founded in 1999 and now based in Vienna. The seven performers here (only Alix Eynaudi, Katharina Dreyer and Agata Maszkiewicz are named) are ordinary in demeanour and carriage but demonstrate great rigour and precision in these looping lip-synched scenes, which contain challenging sequences of cues and gestural detail.

While the on-stage plots depict Hollywood “ready-mades” of modern men and women at their dullest, the intervening video clips revel in brilliant, homespun camp that echoes the earnest mockumentary tone of Spike Jonze. One video enters an orgiastic house party of cheerleaders and hockey jocks, culminating in a cathartic group therapy session involving a very curious “Dance of Liberation” – a comic highlight.

But the show’s most ingenious turn comes with Superamas’ own “behind the tour” video, set to the Jackson 5 anthem “I Want You Back”. Chronicling the company’s big break when they get booked in New York, the sequence features elated street scenes in Times Square, rehearsal footage with leotards straight out of Fame, a slow-motion curtain call, the post-show celebration in a bar. The feel-good, VH1 success montage hits every mark, and is irresistible. Moreover, with this meta-narrative, here is a show willing to implicate itself in its own critique of vanity, fame and happiness. It’s not over yet: The final after-party shot fades into a Trumer Pils beer logo – an actual show sponsor. One big beer commercial – all of it, all along. Whip-smart stuff.

BIG 3rd episode (happy/end) perfectly executes popular media’s most efficient genres, layering them critically without sacrificing any of the pleasure. The treatment is an original one – an amicable exploitation of our appetite for mass media, and for the ideals it sells.

BIG 3rd episode (happy/end) opened the 5th Edition of the Festival Temps d’Images on January 27. Catch the last show tonight at 8 pm. The touring European multimedia festival continues until February 6 at Usine C with a manageable roster of performances, installations and films from the international cutting edge. A hot item will be Belgian composer Thierry De Mey’s live music performance, February 4-6. For tickets and more information visit Usine C’s site.

What does happen when East meets West, really? Culture-crossing Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, one of Europe’s most highly-courted young choreographers, gives his most ambitious two cents to date with Sutra, a 70-minute work that brings to the stage 17 high-flying warrior monks from China’s famed Shaolin Temple. Montreal’s Danse Danse gave its North American premiere at Théâtre de Maisonneuve on Wednesday.

Cherkaoui spent two months studying at the mythic Shaolin Monastery in the mountains of China’s Henan Province to create 2008’s Sutra. Drawing its title from the Sanskrit word meaning thread, or line that holds things together, Sutra’s martial arts tableau revolves around the permutations of a moveable set designed by British sculptor Antony Gormley: 21 human-size, wooden boxes.

Playing a kind of lost soothsayer character dressed in baggy shades of grey, Cherkaoui wanders into a mutating maze-world inhabited by the 17 Shaolin monks. One of them, a cheeky, monkeying 12-year-old, seems to be his guide and only friend. Several times, the pair tinker with miniature blocks and finger-puppet at each other, creating microcosms of (or perhaps wormholes to) what will soon transpire on stage. Their manipulations, however, are often met by vociferous ambush by the group.

Essentially what follows is a fine display of Shaolin techniques, made episodic by the set’s shifting landscapes. The performers wield staffs, spears and swords, perform virtuosic solos, change costumes and go (inexplicably) to battle. Meanwhile, propped up, the boxes form a bustling cityscape, then a temple corridor; stacked, they are a mausoleum, or a Japanese capsule hotel. A mountain rises up, a lotus flower blooms, coffins and boats are dragged. But, while the possibilities of the giant Janga blocks are proven endless, there is not enough choreographic statement to render these worlds lucid, or magical.

Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Cherkaoui emerged from Belgium’s avant-garde and first garnered acclaim for his work, starting in 2000, with the vanguard dance-theatre collective Ballet C. de la B. His contemporary works are known for their intricate cross-cultural tapestries and hybrid movement styles marked by fearless physicality. For a dance-maker like Cherkaoui, Shaolin kung fu should be choreographic gold.

The Temple’s stylistic trademark is its swooping grace, percussive attack, unpredictable shifts in weight and direction, codified incarnations of nature and nature’s beasts. So unfortunate it is then that Cherkaoui does not do much to reveal its inherent virtues as dance, using a choreographer’s eye for texture, phrasing, theatrical juxtaposition. What ends up stealing scenes, albeit deservedly so, are the acrobatics: flying kicks, wheeling backflips and miraculous tumbles. Oh, and the Janga does have its big dominoes moment too.

In the end, Sutra lacks the very thread suggested by its title. It remains an appealing, entertaining work, as the physical prowess of the 17 young Buddhist monks speaks for itself. The boxes have their own cool moves too, and as a performer, Cherkaoui is singular and wholly captivating (there may be no fuller explication of the dimensions of a coffin than when he calmly slinks and slithers against its inside). But these elements remain surprisingly discrete. East did meet West, but they mostly just sat politely and enjoyed each other’s company.

Sutra features an original score by Polish composer Szymon Brzoska, performed live. The show runs until Sunday, November 8 at Théâtre de Maisonneuve, Place des Arts. For tickets: laplacedesarts.com or 514-842-2112.

Is You Me is a multimedia dance piece created and performed by an unlikely hometown pair, Benoît Lachambre and Louise Lecavalier. Both have star-power in their respective worlds – his an experimental cool-kids Europe stemming from “downtown” New York improvisation; hers an iconic contemporary dance career with La La La Human Steps.

But together they have made something radically smaller-than-life, a mischievous little duet in a 2D-world, where two paper cut-out people go about their odd cartoon way.

The stage is a blank, horizontal canvas on a tilt. Live computer graphics by Laurent Goldring animate it throughout – swirling confetti-like specks, naive pencil drawings, blotchy, blocky paint jobs, spongy erasings. Lachambre and Lecavalier, dressed in black and white hooded luge tops and track pants, spend most of the first half peeling up from and flattening themselves against these projections. They bobble their heads quizzically and meet awkwardly, get their legs tangled up and lose against the slope, sliding.

At one point, Lachambre interrogates the appearance of his shadow against a video projection of a windshield pelted by rain. Next, Lecavalier re-enters a blackened scene and, with a miraculously jiggly lower body, seems to scribble white lines all over the stage. In a later vignette, they lift into 3D to don bright yellow and green outfits, their hoodies stretched up high with what one might imagine to be neck stilts. The two careen around like a couple of Gumbys sculpted by Giacommetti – a memorable scene of dumb dawdling.

Throughout Is You Me, Lecavalier and Lachambre create simple, impish moments alone and with each other. Some passages are redundant but the human ink blots do mesmerize. Using a few costume changes – Lecavalier turning her sneakers the wrong way around, Lachambre shrinking out of his pants and leaving deflated ‘legs‘ on stage – they capitalize on the narrowness of our perception of human form to produce some trippy imagery that outdoes, to smart effect, Goldring’s live doodles: These two drawn people seem to do what drawings only wished they could. It seems unjust, then, that the crayons get the climax in the end.

The dancing is most captivating when hyperactive, when Hahn Rowe, the live musician and composer, lays down a beat. Wide, bobbing stances produce all kinds of jerky angles, elbows and arms jutting about in stop-motion, heads wobbling like volume meters on an amplifier. The movement is remarkable in that it is, while disciplined, entirely without affectation, style or theatricality (appropriately, Lachambre and Lecavalier dance with their faces obscured and backs to the audience most of the time), and at several moments achieve riveting effect. Strangely satisfying honed-in performances from dancers, especially Lecavalier, who can “technically” and expressively do much more.

Is You Me was created in Montreal in 2008 by Lachambre, Lecavalier, Rowe and Goldring – under the auspices of Lachambre’s collaborative company Par B.L.eux – and after a worldwide tour, has its last run here at Usine C.

Is You Me, September 23-26, 8 pm at Usine C, 1345 Ave. Lalonde. Tickets at 514 521-4493 or at the box office.

There are better ways to get intimate with the dancers of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens than buying their used pointe shoes during Nutcracker season. The best opportunity comes once every two years, and doesn’t cost a dime. The Dancers’ Choreographic Workshop is a free biennial show at Cinquième Salle conceived entirely by Les Grands company members—from lighting and sound to the souvenir T-shirts, and putting front and centre their own choreographic creations.

Curious to glimpse behind the guarded smiles printed in your Place des Arts program? This year, 10 company dancers reveal themselves by putting on the hat of choreographer: Hervé Courtain, Jean-Sébastien Couture, Dario Giuseppe Dinuzzi, Émilie Durville, Jérémy Galdeano, Russell Lepley, Vanesa G. R. Montoya, Marisa Pauloni, Annie Shreffler and Karell Williams.

Given carte blanche, the budding choreographers have cast their fellow dancers—a handful of them brand new to the company—in works ranging from 3 to 15 minutes each, from intimate solos to sultry tango trios to a big tribal romp for 15. If musical selections are any indication of the diversity of the program, consider a mixtape that includes, among others, Argentinean folk songstress Mercedes Sosa, the freak pop duo CocoRosie, modern classical composer Samuel Barber and the music of Tetris and Zelda—yes, as in Nintendo 64. Expect a surprising smorgasbord of movement styles from artists whose day job it is to inhabit and give expression to so many.

In between rehearsals for Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Romeo and Juliet, to be presented at Théâtre de Maisonneuve in October, and Stijn Celis’ Les Noces, which the company will perform at New York’s Fall for Dance Festival in two weeks, the dancers have been scheduling in studio time with each other and partnering with members of the company’s artistic and administrative staff to produce—on stage and from behind the scenes—every aspect of their 3-night showcase. Already the versatile performers of a wide company repertory, and now choreographers, press agents, production managers and technical crew, the company members of Les Grands stake their claim to the entire creative process—an emboldening project worthy of support.

The workshop (one wonders why it is not an annual event) is a wise initiative on the part of Artistic Director Gradimir Pankov, who seems to understand that the longevity of company’s name also resides in graduating its members into the larger world of dance with skills and confidence as artists, as collaborators, and not simply as muses.

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal’s Dancers’ Choreographic Workshop runs today to Saturday, at 8pm, at the Cinquième Salle of Place des Arts. Tickets are free but will go fast. There is a limit of 4 per person, and donations are welcome. Reservations at 514-842-2112 or in person at the box office. For details, go to Choreographic Workshop.

Féstival TransAmériques’ mammoth headliner combined the signed-and-sealed talents of three international stage stars: Sylvie Guillem, rebel prodigy of classical ballet; Russell Maliphant, wonderboy of British contemporary dance; and Robert Lepage, revolutionary theatre director and one of Canada’s creative greats. Audiences flocked to Éonnagata like firework-revellers around a harbour. In the end, we got cool lights, flashy couture, but little magic.

The subject is colourful enough: the Chevalier d’Éon, 18th century French celebrity transvestite, swordsman and secret envoy of Louis XV. In this famously androgynous figure, Lepage saw an opportunity to evoke the onnagata of Japanese Kabuki theatre, male actors trained to play highly-stylized female roles. Fair enough, and the connection offered Éonnagata costume director, fashion bad boy Alexander McQueen, plenty of material for his sumptuous, cross-cultural designs: opulent, larger-than-life kimonos, translucent caged crinoline petticoats, and a giant pink folding fan standing in for a ruff collar.

Éonnagata is billed as a dance theatre piece, but it’s better off without that label. In fact, let’s strike ‘dance’ off the descriptive altogether, and footnote ‘theatre’ with ‘show and tell, edited live’. Éonnagata is linear storytelling chopped into short scenes by sliding black walls—fade out, fade in, plod, plod—alternating between cumbersome spoken passages about d’Éon’s life (delivered by the performers live or through voice-over) and artsy enactments of what was just explained.

Essentially this smacks of a Lepage pet project. He’s the one having fun play-fighting with staffs and roaming about in decadent period-wear and powdered wigs. To the credit of his team, the scenic design is visually stunning and masterfully-rendered, due in large part to the poetic lighting of Michael Hulls, who crafts ghostly, layered silhouettes and rotating, splintering sheets of light that seem to unmoor space.

But the artistic contributions of Guillem and Maliphant are entirely unclear. Here are two seriously gifted dance artists (and regular collaborators since 2003) with nothing of their own to do. We get a couple glimpses of Guillem’s ear-brushing développé à la seconde (a slow extension of the leg to the side)—and the angels sing from on high. But the rest of the time she is burdened by unwieldy props that distort the impeccable lines of her body. In her most substantial scene, she scribbles away furiously at a letter, with a quill in one hand and a wobbly scimitar in another. For the love of Terpsichore, let the girl use her legs! There are no instruments more swift and slicing.

Choreographer Maliphant’s hybrid movement style is known for its clarity and athletic elegance. There is nothing of his trademark idiom here. Most of Éonnagata’s physical action plays out in excruciatingly meek fight sequences, where the three go at it like Jedi nerds with glinting swords and wooden poles. Are there no other ways of duelling? Ones, perchance, that make use of the real talents of these performers? Other missed choreographic opportunities abound, most notably in the dénouement scene that has the three incarnations of d’Éon conjure each other around a mirror. The optical tricks are a fitting final expression of a character so intrinsically split that he is unable to bind to his own image. But imagination stops short, and what we get is a sober (and less perfect) rendering of the Marx Brothers’ mirror sequence in “Duck Soup.”

When the 90-minute biography ends, we still don’t know why the Chevalier d’Éon is important. If the central inquiry is into the fluidity of gender, its pleasure and its torment, Lepage in drag or Guillem telling about the sexless creatures of Plato’s Symposium (with Maliphant providing his arms and legs behind her) fails to add insight.

Éonnagata is a disappointing work from three artists with such enormous gifts. It inevitably recalls last January’s hot ticket, when French film star Juliette Binoche and British-Indian choreographer Akram Khan shared the stage. So this will not be the first or last time a supergroup fails to eclipse the ready-made fame of its members.

Éonnagata’s three-performance run ends tonight at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 8 pm. www.fta.qc.ca.

There are dances that conceal the body’s materiality and those that do not. Go to a classical ballet and you won’t witness flesh and bone, visceral weight and dimension. Want the brutal truth? See Körper. Created in 2000 for 13 dancers, the work that brought international fame to German choreographer Sasha Waltz seizes the body and lays it bare under a forensic flashbulb glare. Examined as a clinical specimen, the body’s properties are dehumanized and rendered strange, to magnifying effect.

Körper is a plotless series of striking, movement images. The flagship comes early, and is still invincible. Set high inside a black freestanding wall – the stage’s only set-piece – is a shallow Plexiglas display case. Quasi-naked dancers (wearing white underwear) fill it; there is a ghoulish vacancy in their faces. Perhaps, they are blind. Packed in that tight space, they ooze around each other, drifting dumbly as if through an amniotic goop or murky formaldehyde. Slow globules, they stick, then part. Skins smush against the pane, leaving humid traces. This is imagery at its thrilling, potent height.

While Waltz keeps it abstract, grisly undercurrents of human atrocity seethe at the surface. In one small-group section, a man and a woman are literally lifted, dragged and pulled around by the skin. They are meat, calm carcasses strung up on hooks. In another vignette, two women announce the prices of their organs, drink water and get emptied through leaky orifices. Bodies piled, measured in chalk, rolled off a short ledge or dropped into a pit (of sluggish arms) spell genocide as much as it can be spelled without veering into political statements.

There are spoken passages too, monologues about bodily routines and trauma, paired with mismatching gestures. A humorous scene featuring two mangled centaurs – their lower halves (belonging to a different dancer) facing the wrong direction – addresses the fragmented and incongruent body. In a brilliantly-inspired graphic moment, white ceramic tea saucers are held in a vertical column along their spines, rattle noisily, displace and reset themselves – jittery vertebrae of skeletons spooked.

Waltz descends from the German dance expressionism of Mary Wigman and the Tanztheater (dance theatre) tradition of Pina Bausch, but her formalist pursuits of pure movement set her apart. Heavily influenced by the American avant-garde likes of Steve Paxton and Trisha Brown, Waltz’s movement style incorporates contact improvisation and release techniques, lending an unadorned, industrious look to her choreography. In Körper, dancers partner each other in an exchange of weight, poured in precise quantities. On their own, they are human incarnations of the folding metre stick, loose-jointed and hinging in orderly segments. Several movement phrases seem like formal studies of the body’s flat surfaces. Waltz finds them all and slams each one loudly to the floor, in confirmation.

Recently also working in opera, Waltz has been much lauded for her distinctive stage designs. At once spare and dramatic, Körper’s set features an imposing black wall that is suddenly transformed midway through into a gently-tilted horizontal plate. On and around its finite surface, she explores human scale in evocative patterns. How many bodies can fit on that edge? How to stack them to look like teeth, string together to look like tissue? Endless permutations.

Körper is an astounding work that doesn’t age. It showcases Waltz’s particular craftsmanship – the trenchant, loaded imagery, the dance abstraction and theatrical imagination structured into refined tableaux – at its very best.

Körper played two nights to a packed house at Théâtre de Maisonneuve, May 23 & 24, as part of the Féstival TransAmériques. One hopes for a quick return.

The Festival runs until June 6, with many more treats in store. Visit www.fta.qc.ca to find out more.

One look at the programming of this year’s Festival TransAmériques and the memo reads loud and clear: Montreal is back on the map as a major destination for contemporary dance. Only in its third edition since debuting as both a theatre and dance festival, the FTA has prepared a walloping feast for the city’s dance fans. Free shows, a new laboratory for live short works, a bustling festival headquarters and a mouth-watering lineup of top-flight and cutting-edge artists from around the globe signal the arrival of another signature Montreal event.

Never mind Star Trek, the film. The FTA’s summer blockbuster is as big as they come – the North American premiere of Éonnagata, an ambitious new dance theatre piece fresh from its London debut, created and performed by a veritable supergroup made up of Sylvie Guillem, the most infamous ex-étoile of the Paris Opera Ballet; Robert Lepage, the pioneering stage director from Quebec; and leading British choreographer Russell Maliphant. Channeling the magic of Kabuki theatre and the surreal costume stylings of Alexander McQueen, the three megastars join forces to tell the story of the Chevalier d’Eon, the 18th century cross-dressing French spy. Irresistible alchemy with impossible-to-predict effects.

The Who’s Who doesn’t end there. Sasha Waltz, the biggest exponent of German dance since Pina Bausch, is also in town with her abstract fresco of flesh Körper (image shown), arguably the pivotal work of a career that in 2000 marked her defiant departure from Bausch’s Tanztheater tradition. Then there’s Jan Fabre, preeminent agent provocateur of the Flemish New Wave, who presents his anarchic brand of dance theatre in the Canadian premiere of L’orgie de la tolerance, an ensemble work that takes nine performers to the extremes.

Dance highlights from the 18-day festival also include the raucous Singular Sensation by young Israeli choreographer Yasmeen Godder, a rising star on the international circuit, as well as Body-Scan, a meditative dance by Quebec experimental artist Benoît Lachambre and Su-Feh Lee, dancer and qigong specialist from Vancouver. Also on deck is a darling of the local scene, Frédérick Gravel, with his signature ‘best-of’ piece Gravel Works, featuring live music and big dollops of irony.

FTA shows its street cred with two fun, free outdoor shows. The first, Transports exceptionnels by French choreographer Dominique Boivin, is a romantic pas de deux for one man and – wait for it – a giant hoe-loader tractor, on view for five days at the Old Port. The second is an equally cheeky affair, a massive line-dancing block party Le grand continental, choreographed by Montreal mover and shaker Sylvain Émard. For three evenings, some 60 amateur dancers of all ages will invade Émery Street in a brazen and jubilant act of collectivity. Quebec Bollywood, anyone?

Adding to its slew of meet-the-artist events, public readings, films and cocktails, this year FTA inaugurates Microclimats, “a new short art forms event,” which puts 12 teams of multidisciplinary artists on display over two evenings as they inhabit every nook and cranny of the Monument National, transforming its stairwells, attic, basement corridors and closets into spontaneous sites of performance. The perfect outing for voyeurs. Run, don’t walk, as tickets to the big shows are selling fast.

The 2009 Festival TransAmériques runs May 20 to June 6 at venues across town. For dates, locations and video excerpts of all performances, visit www.fta.qc.ca.

Crystal Pite is far and away Canada’s most exciting choreographic talent today.  She’s on a meteoric rise internationally, with a growing roster of commissions from some of the world’s leading companies.  Judging from her newly-minted work, Dark Matters, created on her Vancouver-based company Kidd Pivot and onstage in Montreal through Saturday, this artist lives up to the hype.

Dark Matters asks the big questions about the universe, the mightiest of them being, What moves us?  Weaving through the two-hour piece are haunting extracts of a 1756 poem by Voltaire, written in the Godless wake of the Great Lisbon Earthquake.  The dance for six is in two acts, with at least one disaster dividing them.

The first act is theatrical–a surprising move–and opens with a standard Dr. Frankenstein tale replete with cracks of lightning, a wooden marionette assembled and brought to life, and the eventual glinting-scissor patricide of the Creator (played by Peter Chu).  Using bunraku puppet methods, five performers completely obscured in black clothing deftly animate the evil automaton.  Despite the gothic camp it’s all quite magical.  The show is over quickly, and the shadows, suddenly characters, are left standing around like stagehands with nothing to do. What follows is a fast-paced sequence of comic mayhem fit for the silver screen.  At the risk of divulging too much, expect ninjas and a great shocker at the end.

Where the first act is a dark pantomime coarsely outlining Pite’s philosophical preoccupations, the second is its fleshing-out in pure dance.  The stage now bare, five dancers return in regular clothes, with one shadow character (Pite) still lurking and tinkering in the peripheries.  An abstract suite of solos, duets and ensemble sections situate us again in an uncertain realm of becoming-being.  Like shadows, dancers are sharp-edged and liquid.

Marionette motifs recur too: joints buckle, heads need guiding, bent knees swing open and back like spring doors, sending a shock through the frame.  But in the absence of an engineer, there is a new emotional resonance as dancers grope blindly for and rush to one another, to be steered, or molded.  The group sections are beautiful exercises in connectivity.  Dancers dissipate and cluster like atoms; bonds form, break.  A discrete movement impetus ignites a ripple effect through the chain.

The shadow character works well, alternately endearing and spooky in its omnipresence.  Several times it melts into the real shadows cast by others.  When it joins in on a reprised group sequence, we wonder, was it there the first time?  A powerful, unsettling notion.

Pite danced for five years with Ballett Frankfurt under the groundbreaking direction of William Forsythe, arguably ballet’s most influential innovator of the past two decades.  Her movement vocabulary, in its angularity and strict isolations, certainly echoes Forsythe’s deconstructions of classical line, although with a rare gift for poetic imagery and a cunning wit to boot, she applies color and tension with acute humanist insight.

Her five extraordinary dancers move not only with technical polish but with great feeling and instinct.  Cat-like Yanick Matthon and long, sinuous Jermaine Spivey are particularly cohesive in their bodies, dance down to the detail with exquisite control.  Peter Chu is a boneless wonder, and Cindy Salgado and Éric Beauchesne are also memorable.

To the delight of audiences who also know her as a mesmerizing performer, Pite finally sheds her shadow suit for the poignant finale, a duet with Chu.  Bathed in yellow light with choral music seeping in, innocent life is infused, fused, lost again.  To a final image of ever-mending, one is left with a wide, bottomless feeling of human frailty, and its hold on the sublime.  We have been moved.

Dark Matters opened on April 29 and continues through May 9 at Agora de la danse, 840 Cherrier.  8 p.m.  CALL  514-525-1500.

www.agoradanse.com

Argentinean choreographer Lisi Estarás had all the right ingredients when she created Patchagonia, her first full-evening work for vanguard Belgian company Les Ballets C. de la B. Great dancers who can act. Live musicians on stage. A dramaturge. A clever title underscoring the listless (“patcha”) agony (“agonia”) of the most fabled desert in the Americas. The formula bears the recognizable stamp of Alain Platel, Les Ballets’ pioneering founder. But as this dance play opens onto the vivid, unverifiable expanses of fiction, Patchagonia announces itself: Here is dance theatre that is, finally, resoundingly, much more than the sum of its Flemish New Wave parts.

In the beginning, there is a barren tree, a toppled wooden horse and a raggedy sage bent over in fatigue, or contemplation. A band of migrants wanders in – three musicians, two boys and a girl, cautiously navigating the cracked earth of this desert outpost before settling in like regulars. Vignettes ensue: The old man spouts cryptic wisdom, though no one seems to listen. There is a fiesta, but just to pass the time. A tender play turns quickly to abuse, and a confession ends in someone else’s disembowelment. One is left to wonder, with a pretty foreboding sense: What is this place, and what did these people do to end up here?

Estarás’ movement idiom is physically intense, often animalistic, containing and revealing the idiosyncracies of her characters. Nicolas Vladyslav is exceptional as an amphibious, wasted son, slinking languorously on the floor, heat-dazed to a final depletion. He has an impish foil in Ross McCormack, terrifically funny as a brawny little menace obsessed with his masculine prowess, kicking up proud gazelle legs, puffing his chest and throwing in a few pull-ups. Veteran performer Sam Louwyck towers and teeters (but can he guide?) as the holy fool, while young lass Sandra Ortega Bejarano is alternately flighty and headstrong, literally inflating and deflating in the end.

For the music, Estarás teamed up with Tcha Limberger, a multi-instrumentalist of Flemish and Manouch gypsy descent and one of the on-stage musicians, with whom she had worked as a Les Ballets C. de la B. dancer in 2006. Limberger’s original compositions for Patchagonia draw from folk dances and chacarera and malambo rhythms of Northern Argentina, combined with his own gypsy style.

For a first major work, Patchagonia is a remarkable achievement. Estarás defies the standard pitfalls of a young choreographer, binding the elements and an ambitious amount to convey with strong, poetic vision that stays focused and even throughout. Dance and theatre are thoroughly fused. She fully invests and dares expressively in all four characters, raising their family drama to the level of allegory, and although a lot happens on stage, Patchagonia remains arrestingly desolate, an unmistakable, remote place sapped of change.

Patchagonia had it North American premiere April 15 at the Cinquième Salle, Place des Arts.

The arrival of a new Rite of Spring inspires a kind of bloodlust among dance audiences.  Not for the maiden who we know is sacrificed in the end, but for the latest choreographer stepping up to the towering Goliath of Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 score, arguably the seminal scandal that defined twentieth century music. Now, Belgian firebrand Stijn Celis adds his name to the long file of choreographers who flock to this irrepressible music, facing the historical gauntlet with his own The Rite of Spring, created on Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. The ballet for 24 dancers received its world premiere at Théâtre Maisonneuve Thursday March 26, on a double bill with a reprise of Shen Wei’s 2007 Re-,II.

In keeping with famous predecessors like Maurice Béjart and Pina Bausch who re-envisioned Nijinsky’s original pagan ritual as an all-out war of the sexes, Celis situates the drama between polarizing male and female forces.

The women don shapeless white tops and loose skirts, accented with slashes of violent red; the men wear grey slacks and earth-tone dress shirts. The woozy, waking bassoon solo peels open a social scene: Spring couples tangle, twirl and fling with their full bodies at a frantic, mechanical clip, their code involving some swing dance moves too.  Forceful and busy, the main concern seems to get it all done in time.

Soon the men and the women separate out, and the clan’s gender dynamic emerges.  Here is where Celis‘ choreographic (re)vision is most compelling. To Stravinsky’s pulverizing polyrhythms, the women grind on. At once coquettish and severe, they jut and rock their pelvises, carve vicious arcs with scythe-like bodies and coil in and out of circles of incantation. Unlike many female depictions in Rite, these girls are no savages in heat. If Celis evokes brutality, it is through the cold, unflinching march of the cell.

The men, however, have grown weary, worn down. Heavy with earth and toil, they pull at their heads, heave and drop like flies. As the girls spin out of reach, male partners console and buttress each other. In one effective section in which male and female collectives share the stage, the guys beat rhythmically at their slackened chests as the women, in a kinetic frenzy on the opposite side, leap and shoot their arms in upward diagonals, bare feet raining percussively onto the floor as if to drive the boys further into the ground.

Given the ballet’s traditional foregone conclusion of female sacrifice, Celis’ persuasive reversal of gender victimhood is a pointed re-reading. But puzzlingly, this Rite too ends in a pretty standard ‘Danse sacrale’, a poor girl’s dance to the death, with the suddenly-macabre group hovering and convulsing nearby. While certain moments leading up to the solo are intriguing, like the Chosen One’s refuge in the arms of a man and the venom it then spreads, the final extended harakiri is a bit of a miss, dilutes the piece when it should make it gel. Not the time for a paradigm shift, nor an anxiety of influence, as Stravinsky’s strings start careening all over the place, brassy dissonances swell to a terrifying mass and everything tame is wiped to oblivion.  Despite some promising ideas and committed dancing in this Rite, the music, in its raw, ageless brilliance, remains indomitable.

The second piece on the program, a revival of Re-,II by Chinese choreographer Shen Wei (who incidentally also has a Rite under his belt), is a welcome palate-cleanser for those still wound-up from The Rite of Spring, although it is a wonder that the dancers manage the gear shift. Created on Les Grands in 2007 and inspired by the choreographer’s visit to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Re-,II is a three-part impressionistic tableau evoking stone friezes, gnarled roots, otherworldly birds and eons of time. Like sleek ribbons set into motion by breath, dancers are at once sinuous and sculpturesque, melt into the floor or propel each other in seamless contact. The images offered in the final section are of a rare and indelible beauty.

The final three performances of The Rite of Spring and Re-,II by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens run Thursday to Saturday, April 2, 3 and 4 at Théâtre Maisonneuve, Place des Arts. Tickets at 514-842-2112 or www.pda.qc.ca.

A TINY, MERCURY RIVULET of meaning dips and ducks in the stony regions of minimalism, and Antonija Livingstone has found it. An interdisciplinary movement-based artist now living and working in Montreal, Livingstone creates mysterious semiotic worlds out of task-like, repetitive movement and subtle evocations of connectedness. She nails the formula in her latest incarnation of Even Steven, a re-working of a duet created in 2005 with her regular collaborator, Heather Kravas, and presented with new performers at Tangente as part of the 2009 Edgy Women Festival.

In the 45-minute dance, two men and two women inhabit quiet islands of ordinary movement, while a naive-seeming outsider (Livingstone) orbits about and tries to assimilate by emulating their physical lexicons. The female duo (k.g. guttman and Elizabeth Ward) is simply-clad in white socks, black tights and white t-shirts, ironically evoking the Balanchine male. They execute a basic balletic move — a stepping pivot from fourth position, back and forth — in unison, and for the entirety of the piece. The phrase evolves only spatially, sometimes rhythmically, and the women concentrate hard as they explore shifting geometric patterns on the stage.

The men (Paul Chambers and Jérémie Lavallée) are in fact the sound guys, and sit limply on the floor amidst their mixers and jumbled wires. They wear ordinary clothes, look pretty bored and chat discreetly with each other. Midway through the show, one abruptly falls asleep, slumping into the arms of the other; a little while later, they switch. They continue in this comical exchange of deadweight until the concentric pair drag each other to the back of the stage.

Livingstone is the lost child, first appearing inside a quilted cubbyhole in the vent shaft. She dangles down in red stockings and an oversize neon orange hoodie, and with the shy reluctance of a fawn, eventually moves in step with the girls. She catches on fast but as her own elaborations multiply, three becomes a crowd. Straying, she fixes finally on the heap of sound equipment, mounting it gingerly, then letting it mount her. Her lonely ritual of discovery, now mimicking the boys, ends in a powerful final image of survivalism and self-sustenance.

Now based in Montreal after years of nomadism in Europe, working with the experimental likes of Meg Stuart and Benoît Lachambre, Livingstone is a young dance maker to be closely watched. In Even Steven II, she demonstrates great choreographic maturity in her rigorous minimalist design and patient, virtuosic use of repetition, inventing pedestrian behaviour in alien codes. Simple steps gather mysterious depth with each iteration, and tiny shifts of dynamics register narrative shockwaves. The female duet is especially wondrous. Through an industrious synchronicity, the women’s individualities and physical particularities emerge with vivid authenticity. Livingstone is clearly a woman who knows women.

Montreal’s Edgy Women Festival is an interdisciplinary fun-fest for contemporary feminist expression, featuring performances, professional workshops, talks and socials with local and international artists. This year’s 16th edition runs through March 21 at various venues across town. It’s not too late to catch the last weekend of performances at Tangente: Friday’s double bill features the world premiere of Peur Laine, a multidisciplinary piece about Quebec xenophobia by queer Montreal artist VAL Desjardins, and Kristine Nutting’s dark, absurdist musical PIG. Closing the festival on Saturday is Just Being, a final line-up of raucous, fringy gems where one can expect to see contortionism, a vulgar ventriloquist act and a human disco ball.

Friday, Saturday performances at Tangente, 840 Cherrier. For a complete schedule see www.edgywomen.ca.