100 RENCONTRES - RESIDENCY AT SAT

A modular performance project under the artistic direction of Benoît Lachambre

“Our project makes the coexistence of different modules, designed by various artists, possible. We accept the challenge of questioning our artistic convictions through the confrontation of our respective visions. We seek to explore the idea of encounter, its mobility, and that which can come out of such an exchange. The project is not a dance performance, nor a representation, but above all a choreographic event to be lived and experienced by the performers as well as by the public. Over the course of the evening, we invite the spectator to build his/her own experience as an independent observer and creator in his/her own right. There is freedom of choice in the order of discovery for each proposition, the duration and intensity of attention as well as the point of view to be adopted.”

– Benoît Lachambre and his co-creators

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100 Rencontres is a variable geometry event that transforms itself according to the presentation space and depending on the possibilities for artistic encounter in the host city.

The spectator is free to walk around the presentation space, where the various distinct modules have been established, like in a gallery. There, the public will witness – and can even participate in – spectacular or non-spectacular performances, plastic installations and playful events. Each guest artist creates his or her own work. Under the artistic direction of Benoît Lachambre, they (eux) – Martin Bélanger, joe hiscott, Benoît Lachambre, Sheila Ribeiro, Pierre Rubio and visual artists Jorge Leon Alvarez and Julie Andrée T.– are both authors of and often performers in their own modules. Louis-Philippe St-Arnault, as technical director, is responsible for the elaboration and realisation of the modules. Also contributing to the project are the sound designers David Kilburn and Laurent Maslé and lighting designer Jean Jauvin. Together, this technical team creates in the space a complete environment. To this core group is added guest artists who change according to the venue and propose their own modules.

In the course of a visit, the spectator may interact with gigantic “maris-honnêtes” characters, venture into a forest of adhesive tape (modules by Pierre Rubio); witness a search by a customs agent who uses only his feet (!) (module by Martin Bélanger); or listen to the sounds he/she produces, thanks to a very special machine (module by Benoît Lachambre and David Kilburn). These are just a few examples of the possible encounters and artistic experiences that 100 Rencontres will offer.

Each module for 100 Rencontres brings us back, naturally, to one of the recurring notions in Benoît Lachambre’s work: a constant questioning of the idea of representation, and the deconstruction of the performance space. The project will also provide a real opportunity for artists from different disciplines to come together – visual artists, musicians, lighting designers, choreographers, dancers, performers, etc. – to challenge the creation process in contemporary dance.

The coexistence of modules in the same space allow for the creation of sound (David Kilburn and Laurent Maslé) and light (Jean Jauvin) environments that envelop the event as a whole, while the spectator moves freely about the space, from one module to another, almost always certain to be surprised. It takes about two hours to witness the development of all of the actions in 100 Rencontres.

A modular performance project under the artistic direction of Benoît Lachambre
Festival de théâtre des Amériques – 25 au 29 mai 2005
200 pour 100 Rencontres à Montréal

Original Concept, Benoît Lachambre

RÉSIDENCE DE RECHERCHE ET DE CRÉATION SAT

Jean-Sébastien Baillat, Mathieu Bélanger, Germana Civera, joe hiscott, Emmanuel Jouthe, Benoît Lachambre, Line Nault, Sheila Ribeiro, Isabelle Schad, Julie Andrée T., Chanti Wadge

Lighting

par b.l.eux (Montréal) / La Filature – Scène nationale (Mulhouse) / Festival Montpellier Danse 03 (Montpellier) / KunstenFESTIVALdesArts (Bruxelles) / Le Quartz – Scène nationale de Brest / Parc de La Villette – Résidences d’Artistes (Paris).

100 Rencontres had receive a creation residency from la Société des arts technologiques [SAT] (Montréal).

Company par b.l.eux receives support from the Canada Council for the Arts, le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, le Conseil des arts de Montréal, Foreign Affairs Canada, la ville de Montréal and le ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec.

200 pour 100 Rencontres à Montréal

Les modules d’installation et d’intervention et leurs auteurs

This module is a contraption that re-structures the physical proximity of the encounter between two people. The process is rudimentary, childish even; the contraption itself is a person whose legs are protruding from an egg. The contacts and movements we normally associate with the hands are relocated to the legs, for the one inside the egg. Private verbal communication is made possible through a tube. Anonymity is guaranteed, as the two parties are never face-to-face.

This module has a register that is somewhat baroque. It calls up elements of “kitschy” science fiction as well as elements of the symbolism of the egg: the origin, the soul, and isolation. The egg is housed in a tent, which is in fact an extension of the egg. This tent is part of the environment’s whole. It can be a crossroads, a waiting room, and a boudoir… Those who linger there are witnesses to the individual encounters between the spectators and the egg’s inhabitant. However, cut off from the conversation, their experience cannot be the same – the exchange remains mysterious and the experience of observation a living tableau, an intimate dance. The one who occupies the egg is, of course, in a particular position. As a result, he exchanges with the other from another state, another point of view, almost as an oracle would…

Martin Bélanger

Martin Bélanger started working in theatre before discovering dance in 1992. He completed a BA in dance at l’UQAM in 1997, where he was awarded the William Douglas award for excellence. Since 1996, Bélanger has been concentrating on creation. In September 2002, he presented Spoken Word / Body, his sixth presentation at Tangente (Montreal). His solo Démonstration n^o 1 was presented in New York (March 2001) and in Japan (August 2002). Parallel to his own work in creation, he continues to perform for others in dance as well as in theatre and film. He has been collaborating with Benoît Lachambre (Confort et complaisance, 100 Rencontres) and is part of the PME collective (experimental theatre) directed by Jacob Wren.

These interviews were born from a necessity for questioning and encounter, a different kind of encounter than I had already experienced in my practice of physicality and over my twenty years of experience as a choreographic artist. It is something very simple, very direct: asking questions, to the Other, to the others… questions about the body, about being, about dance. The variety of definitions we have for dance says a lot about our absence of ‘definition’ for being, and the desire to find one that fits a bit better before we change our minds. The dance of definitions…

These discussions – for now – are also an excuse to confront the Other, to get closer, to share these questions which are also my preoccupations, and which I consider important to raise today. Through the process of these questionings I met Benoît Lachambre and, well, here I am. Germana Civera. That’s all.

Germana Civera

Germana Civera was born in Puerto Sagunto, Spain, where her father introduced her to yoga. It was there that she started her training in classical dance. She trained in contemporary dance techniques in Barcelona’s Institut del Teatre and in New York with Merce Cunningham and Janet Pannetta. She then studied under Hans Zullig at the Folkwangs school and at the Théâtre Contemporain de la Danse in Paris.

In 1990, she joined Mathilde Monnier’s company, where she was part of all new creations and international tours through 1998. From 1994 to 2000, she assisted Mathilde Monnier on a number of projects for the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier.

As a choreographer, she has worked with Alain Rigout as well as with visual artists Victoria Civera and Juan Uslé. For the work La transe des ciseaux, an installation/performance created in New York, she was the laureate of the “Villa Médicis Hors les murs “ grant from l’AFFA (Association Française d’Action Artistique) and the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. L’AFFA has also called upon her talents for a number of educational activities in Belgrade. She has taught contemporary dance at the Centre National Chorégraphique de Montpellier, the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique de Toulouse, the Ménagerie de Verre (Paris), l’Université d’Art Dramatique de Perpignan and in Spain at the Universidad Miguel Hernandez (Altea). Since 1995, she has focused her research on the body language of persons with autism.

Germana is currently working with Jérome Bel, Laurent Goldring, Victoria Civera, and Juan Uslé. She is the artistic director of her own company, inesperada.

For me, Figures is a sculpture-conference on the subject of the face of Germana Civera. Her face is in the horizontal alignment of six heterogeneous configurations: four films, a table, a voice. The six facets featured contradict each other, speaking of the “becoming” of a face that magnifies the story being told. If dance exists to short-circuit the way bodies are expected to behave and react, the portrait allows us to detach ourselves from language, and the face, a virtual black hole, can spread itself over the blank slate of its own flesh. The piece demonstrates once more that we cannot push expectation and convention aside without questioning our ideas about representation.

Laurent Goldring

Since 1995, Laurent Goldring’s work is centred on the representation of the body, and a questioning of the domination of the analogical image (photo, film, video) by revealing how limiting it can be. He has researched the portrayal of the body throughout history, discovered new ways of representation, and his work demonstrates that to date we have actually seen only very little of the body. His approach has been of great interest to a number of choreographers whose process follows the same questioning, and they have opened up dance to a new way of seeing the body. Benoît Lachambre and Germana Civera were among the first artists to use this new variable in their work. Today, Goldring pursues his research with portrait photography, with the same questions and the same effects.

His videos have been widely screened at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Fondation Gulbenkian (Lisbon), the Laboratorium (Utrecht), Hors Série (Montpellier) and recently at UQAM during the FIND.

 

 

In a reserved space, The sheet ( Un drap) invites us to witness private moments, be it biological, psychological or metaphysical, through sensory, visual, auditory and kinesthetic experiences.

A supine, anonymous body limited in movement, voice and creative capacity provides the rare opportunity to meet the body in its most vulnerable, innocent state, where there is no distinction between race, belief, gender, talent or language.

Virtuality, reality and interpretation of invisible happenings mix in this meeting between the ‘self’ of the spectator and the translation of the ‘selves’ created through the bodies of the performers, imaginary spaces, subliminal references to the play between life and death and the interconnections that lie within.

Simultaneously, the performative body meets itself through the listening of its own breath and the witnessing of its own mind-body oscillations, which ride through states of continual transformation and surprise.

With the intimacy of listening to a lover’s heartbeat and the stark and clinical aesthetic of a morgue, The sheet provides an experience that is so simple it’s practically forbidden.

joe hiscott

After many years as an athlete and many more investigating various forms of performance and video, joe continues to chase the mysteries of the unknown through research on stage, screen and behind the scenes. With a somewhat scientific approach and through a perspective of ontological warfare, joe’s inquiries are varied, from the controversy of gender fluidity, to the complexities of inner states of being. These curiosities express themselves through film, performance, travel, building strawbale houses and mixing cement. joe’s findings thus far are inconclusive.

How can I say who I am ? Who am I beyond the determinations and gaze of the Other ? For 50 minutes, Emmanuel Jouthe travels on a path of initiation to freedom. He explores his deepest intimacy in the complete exposure of a shop window. Emotive matrix exposed to the gaze of passers by. The paradox of interiority bared in full view. In a work full of contrasts, the choreography unfolds to the degree that the choreographer unveils. He humbly shares the emotional truth so dear to him in his work. By opening himself to the core of city activity and to a well-designed installation, he poses questions of our relationship to time, to space, to the dancer and to dance itself.

Emmanuel Jouthe

Emmanuel Jouthe was drawn to choreography early in his career. In the course of his training, he was lucky to have met creators that have inspired and stimulated his work, such as Paul-André Fortier, Daniel Léveillé and William Douglas. As a member of Danse Carpe Diem, he has created and performed a number of works, including Le Sabot de Maogani, FH… les petites morts de la paume, 3 Centauromachia 4, M and his most recent piece Dimanche XXIe. His work has been presented principally in Montreal, but also in Toronto and Ottawa, in Germany and Italy.

Emmanuel Jouthe continues to develop his artistic vision, combining his choreographic experience with new takes on the performance space and on movement vocabulary, to help bring the performer and the spectator closer together. Recently, during the Festival international de nouvelle danse 2003, he presented the first phase in the diptych Dimanche XXIe, Vitrail, a three-hour piece performed in the store window of the optician Georges Laoun. In Vitrail, Emmanuel Jouthe performs a one-hour solo entitled Aechylos, created during a choreographic residency in Berlin. The second phase, Æternam, co-produced by Danse-Cité, was presented in October 2004.

Parallel to his career in creation, Emmanuel Jouthe has performed in works by some of today’s most well-known choreographers : Paul-André Fortier, José Navas, Louise Bédard, Daniel Soulières, Pierre-Paul Savoie, Felix Ruckert, and Julyan Hamilton. For the theatre, he has worked with Pascal Contamine, Robert Gravel, Jean-Pierre Ronfard and Paula de Vasconcelos. He is also a member of the board of directors for the orientation commitee for the Journees de la culture event.

 

Depending on its use, this module either connects or disconnects the eternal to/from the external. It isolates or brings together the approaches of its participants according to their degree of participation. It can, with a slight change in perspective, veil or unveil the identity of the person in the external zone. It can subsequently distort the perception of the silhouette of the performer inside the module. The performer observes and assimilates the information coming from outside. He is permeable, and creates vocally the sound environment. Sound meets performance at the core of this module. Simultaneously, cyclical lighting varying in colour and intensity (but independent of the performance) colour one’s reading of the elements presented. Of course, the object exists. However, the work is born from the interventions that inhabit it.

Who becomes a spectator? And when? The spectator outside, in choosing a position in relation to the object, drastically modifies his/her experience, and the relation and accessibility to the inside. From inside the module, it is difficult to see all. The “performer” carries an intriguing array of elements for sound interfacing, and hides behind this handicap the ability to reach his goal through the modulation of textures of his voice. The difficulty to distinguish the spoken word allows for flexibility in the interpretive role of each spectator. The process may seem strictly intellectual; but the basic elements are emotional, and will vary in intensity depending on the form of the relationship established. I want to reach the human being, in the peaceful, noble and archaic sense of the term.

From Big B to the performer “out of the box”, this module is addictive, one with an ambiguous “rein” attached. The physical connection is a technological one, the object a poetic prosthesis. This system impels exchange into multiple impromptu dynamics.

Benoît Lachambre

From 1978 to 1990, Benoît Lachambre worked as choreographer, performer, improviser and teacher. In New York in the mid-’80’s, he began research in releasing, choreography and improvisation techniques with Stephanie Skura and Nina Martin. In 1990, he began teaching and leading workshops in research, improvisation and body consciousness. In the same period, he also danced for Marie Chouinard and Meg Stuart and performed throughout Europe. In October 1996, he founded his own company par b.l.eux. Benoît Lachambre received the Jacqueline-Lemieux prize in 1998 from the Canada Council for the Arts. After the performance of his solo Délire Défait in Toronto, he received, in the dance categories, the 2001 Dora Mavor More Award, both for Outstanding Performance and Outstanding New Choreography. His most recent choreographic work is concerned with the dynamics of communication and perception expressed through a growing use of improvisation and performance art in dance.

 

The photographs that I showed Benoît when he invited me to participate in the project were produced in backrooms/dark rooms. These rooms are designed so that, in the dark, bodies can come together for anonymous sexual encounters.

100 Rencontres, a place for encounter. What kinds of encounter? These slides will perhaps evoke something about the body in question.

Jorge Leon Alvarez

Born in Belgium in 1967. He studied film at INSAS (Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle) in Brussels. Between 1989 and 1995 he worked as director of photography on many short and long films. He has equally developed his photo and video work which has been exposed in various European countries where he was … In the world of dance, he has collaborated with such choreographers as Wim Vandekeybus, Michèle-Anne De Mey, Olga de Soto and Meg Stuart. His work incorporates photography, video and film.

A two parts cubic installation where the visitors are arms open and eyes close welcoming.

Les Passagers

Since 2001, Les Passagers (Jean-Sébastien Baillat et Mathieu Bélanger) create visual environments that have mesmerized visitors to a number of electronic music events in Montreal, and most notably their participation in a number of events with the Epsilonlab collective. This collective has produced a DVD, AUDIOVIDEOTHERAPY, which includes a segment by Les Passagers. In the spring of 2003, they became the resident DJs at the Aria club, where they appear once or twice each month.

Their imagery presents a highly personal environment, which can be as playful as it is upsetting, with characters that appear out of nowhere and who, from time to time, address the spectator usiing enigmatic language.

Graphic designers and filmmakers Les Passagers are also organizers and promoters for electronic interdisciplinary events, like the 3 Passage evenings held annually from 2000 to 2003. During choreographer Benoît Lachambre’s residency at the Société des Arts Technologiques in 2003, they helped in the conception of the subversive event Concours de Circonstances where projections, movement and musical performances drew the spectator into an immersive and ever-evolving tableau.

In September 2003, they won first prize in the VJ Lumen contest organized as part of the Montreal World Film Festival, and in November of the same year they were part of the Festival Elektra at Montreal’s Usine C.

In 2004, they were invited to participate in the first edition of the festival Les escales improbables for artists without borders in Montreal’s Old Port, where they presented their first installation combining video and performance.

Pay Here and The First REAL Human Clone, propose the encounter of relativity by using Principle as an essential source.

Pay Here

Pay Here plays with allowance, with the forbidden and with conditions. Marketing slogans expose the relationship between belief and the way in which that belief is manifested through advertising. This module embraces both advertisements that instigate consummation, as well as the circulation of ideas and their conscious or unconscious adoption. The public knowledge is deformed until its entropy. Without the guarantee of success, but rather the tendency to fool both the performer and the spectator, this pseudo-venerable place invites us to believe, to wait, to wish, to be surveyed or to be a VIP. Pay Here encapsulates a heated boardroom debate into one aphorism, then subverts it into one gesture. In a pop context, paradoxically impure and aseptic, illusion is really the only object of worship.

right                                                                wrong

In this exploration I take on the role of my own clone. Low tech diagrams of the phases of the clone’s biological development as well as the evolution of its mentality are displayed as a clue into the process of the clone’s creation. While the clone’s mitochondrion and DNA grow, different sources of thinking and of world visions are integrated in the clone’s development. Juxtaposing the pros and cons through statements belonging to defined value systems such as artists, intellectuals, esoterics, religious fanatics and what have you, in this half-playful, half-melancholic context, constitute a REAL human clone.

My participation in the 100 rencontres project

I understand that encounter takes place in chance, in the unspoken, in confrontation or in transformation. Once we have it, it is no longer an encounter. I feel privileged to be able to share intimate moments, artistic or otherwise, with other artists hand-picked by Benoît Lachambre. I think that my work brings a pop, sarcastic and melancholic influence to the group.

Sheila Ribeiro

Interested in power and its dynamics, Sheila aligns her work along the axis of ideological deformation by juxtaposing values and aesthetics of semiotic systems. The result is a raw, sharply cynic work. Even though she has been seriously immersed in Classical Ballet, Modern and “Contemporary” Dances, Butoh, Belly Dancing, and academia, Sheila’s influences are widespread, drawing from urban communication and human, artistic and intellectual exchanges. Her company, dona orpheline danse, has been producing contemporary choreographic creations for stage and video since 1992. Sheila has been dancing for 22 years. She also writes

By definition the repeated step is never the same as the one you want to repeat, the same goes that to re-present an image does not lead to the repetition of its original presentation. Drawing these two notions together onto and into my ‘female’ body, this project explores the relationships operating between perception, reception and the body and how they come to be defined in each and the ‘other’. This work moves to define the gaps in the hidden and the seen scenes of the projected and real body, interrogating along the way the imagined and the real, the real and the identified.

The work of this piece performed in the gap between presentation and re-presentation of a body representing both subject and object whilst simultaneously splits body from person, seeks to redefine through this process the dialectic between inside/outside, publicity and privacy. The work appropriates certain notions of voyeuristic spectatorship on the body, ‘takes-out’ their known perception and instead installs that which is not seen and therefore blind to vision for an altogether new and relevant distinction between reality and appearance, true and false, acting and not acting, seeing and not seeing others/oneself.

The notion of joining a blind vision to the construction of ‘images’ for this performance is further extracted and augmented in the authorities of vision operating between spectator/performer. To do this a continuous ‘rear-vision’ is employed generating a forward/backward rotation elicited through a live dialogue between spectators and the performer. Drawing on a number of references and quotations from various media, film, photography and text, a series of serial patterns, looping systems and live actions will be generated towards their performative possibilities juxta-positioned via different soundtracks. The conversations held between spectators and the performer, perceiveand receive each other through the generation of questions and descriptions that test new possibilities/ impossibilities in communication.

Isabelle Schad

Since 1999, Isabelle Schad has been working independently as a dancer/performer, choreographer and organizer of transdisciplinary projects, collaborating with musicians, visual artists, choreographers, performers, actors, and lighting designers (Adriana Sa, Angela Guerreiro, Bruno Pocheron, Carlos Zingaro, Felix Ruckert, Jim Whiting, Ludger Lamers, Olga Mesa amongst others). With her own work she is performing regularly in German, Belgian, French and Portuguese theatres/alternative spaces as well as at international festivals (e.g. Internationale Tanzwochen Münster, Internationale Tanzwochen Wien). She has been/is regularly supported by Ultima Vez (Brussels), Dock11 (Berlin), Podewil (Berlin), TIF (Dresden), VOXXX (Chemnitz), Monty (Antwerpen).

During her training as a classical dancer (1980-90) and through her experiences in several classical ballet companies (1990-96) and in Ultima Vez/ Wim Vandekeybus (1996-98) she encountered many diverse ways of working, already experimenting and initiating her own projects.

Her latest productions This is just to do (conceived in collaboration with the Portuguese musician Adriana Sa, 2000/01), SwitchPositionFreezeControl (2001), and The better you look the more you see (conceived in collaboration with Bruno Pocheron 2002/03) are approaching from different angles issues such as representation, recognition and identification, communication and the languages of the body. For the year 2003 she is artist in residence in Podewil, Berlin.

She met Benoit Lachambre during the festival “Tanz made in Berlin” (December 2002). Upon seeing each other’s performances they realized they had a desire to collaborate.

Some thoughts on the corridor:

Narrow space. Passageway, space for immediate and spontaneous meetings. Rapid exchanges, exchanges of looks, of greetings, short messages, information. A hallway is a space for movement and transition. Its primary function is leading the person in question to another place. The corridor is like a river in architecture, the only possible escape. An impersonal space where strangers and acquaintances meet.

Le corridor is, in this case, a stop on a trip, one that has no possible exits. A space for encounter shared by sound, image, stories and daily life. An encounter, not with a performer, but between the individual members of the public and the contents of the sound and visual interventions. Le corridor, with its sterile plastic material and its almost aggressive lighting, is hardly inviting. Those who pass are nonetheless invited to linger, to create their own reading, their own experience. It is from this simple duality that comes our discomfort. We want to explore, discover, stay a little longer; and we are pushed away, assailed. We want to escape. But in order to leave, we must retrace our steps, our journey, our own little story.

Julie Andrée T.

Julie Andrée T. holds a degree in Fine Arts from Concordia University. She is active in the spheres of installation and performance art, and the body and space are at the heart of her research. She has presented performances in Europe and in Canada. Last year, she showed two new installations in solo exhibits at A SPACE (Toronto) and Articule (Montreal). Since 1999, she has collaborated with Jacob Wren on the project En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize; with Xavier Le Roy (in Berlin) on E.X.T.E.N.T.I.O.N; and more recently, with Dominique Porte. In February 2000 she created Somnolence, an installation for Benoît Lachambre’s L’Aberration des Traces.

 

Sound Environment

Each module produces its own sounds within the presentation space. For 100 Rencontres, I wanted to create a general sound environment in which each module plays a part, while still remaining separate. I want to reach out, with sound, to each individual. Actually, each visitor, depending on the place and the moment he/she occupies at a given time, will encounter and perceive sound “propositions” belonging only to them. This is using sound as it can exist in time and in space.

Laurent Maslé

Light

The theme of encounter, particularly in the context proposed by this project, offers an opportunity to question the classical structure of representation. In the manner of an installation, the encounter with the public (as well as among the creators) is situated in a double rapport with the space: the physical space that houses us, as well as the various modules proposed. It was thus important to first “expose” this space, defining clearly the cohabitation space, with an objective lighting that revealed the borders. In juxtaposition to this approach, I also experimented with subjective lighting, this time seeking to influence in varying degrees the relationship between the performer and the public, but also between the performer and his/her modular environment. Through the use of tri-chromatic lighting technology borrowed from architectural techniques, I was able to experiment with light in a global approach to the performance, and to define each module as a separate, coherent individual space for encounter.

– Jean Jauvin

Laurent Maslé – Sound Environment

Originally from France, Laurent Maslé moved to Montreal in 1987. He has been an active part of the contemporary dance scene for over a decade. He has created music and soundscapes for more than thirty works by a number of choreographers, including Benoît Lachambre, José Navas, Dominique Porte and Emmanuel Jouthe. Laurent also collaborates with visual artists on installation projects, as well as working on art and documentary films.

 

Jean Jauvin – Lighting

Marie-Andrée Gougeon – Artistic Assistant for the creation

Marie-Andrée Gougeon danced for more than twelve years alongside the most prominent Canadian choreographers of the eighties and nineties. In 1994, she left the stage to devote herself to rehearsal direction, teaching and research. Her more recent artistic collaborations have been with the choreographers Martin Bélanger, Benoît Lachambre, Daniel Léveillé, José Navas, Jean-Pierre Perreault, Marie-Claude Poulin and Sasha Waltz. Awarded a master degree in science (kinanthropology) from the Université du Québec à Montréal, Marie-Andrée is continuing her research into the workings of mental imagery in body alignment for dancers.

 

Louis-Philippe St-Arnault – Technical Director

Environment and object designer, Louis-Philippe St-Arnault devotes himself to researching stage matter and light and to developing performance installations. For several years, his experimentation has fostered collaborations with, amongst others, Par B.L.Eux (Benoît Lachambre), kondition pluriel (Marie-Claude Poulin and Martin Kusch), Carpe Diem (Emmanuel Jouthe), Livia Daza-Paris, Pont Bridge (Carole Nadeau) and Omnibus. He also has an interest in the development of art and technology, and creates  independent installations, including that of ‘Chercheurs de moules’, presented in Montreal in 2004 in collaboration with the photographer Janicke Morissette and ‘Relations Scanner’.