About two years ago, I had a sudden flash of insight as to who I thought had created this art. But then I failed to write the name down, and now all I’m left with is the memory of remembering. But not remembering who.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet.
Which is kind of appropriate seeing as how they (it) aren’t that far from the Allan Memorial. But then I had another flash, “how about I write to someone at the Royal Victoria Hospital and ask?” Veronique Scott was extremely gracious and prompt. And if my memory serves, the “flash” I had about the artist wasn’t Michel Goulet. So I still have a ways to go.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
Done five years after Les leçons singulières (although the city’s database says that Les leçons singulières were done in 1992, M. Goulet’s website says 1990). They are similar in that they use copper and seem to tell some sort story.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
Although it is very very similar in concept to the CCA Garden which was designed by Melvin Charney, who is definitely not Michel Goulet. It’d be nice to talk to both of them and get their thoughts.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
Les moments magiques by Michel Goulet at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal.
I‘ve been feeling guilty. Last year, back in November, I saw THE GOLDEN MEAN (LIVE) (yeah, I don’t like things that are all in capital letters either… But that’s how she spells it) one of the newer creations by Marie Chouinard. I wanted to write about it, but then got hung up in the humorous verse cycle I wrote about the Quebec Triennial. By the time I had finished that, it was the beginning of January 2012, and the absolute need to write about a performance I had seen almost three months prior was more like a theoretical and potential concept than a valid reality.
But then on Friday I had a Marie Chouinard day. I first saw her at the DHC Art Foundation’s exhibit Chronicles of a Disappearance (more on that in a separate article, in short go hang out on the fourth floor for at least 30 minutes, Ms. Chouinard didn’t) in the afternoon. And then saw her at the performance of “Je” by Dominique Porte (also more on that in a separate article) that night. But this time, Ms. Chouinard had to stick around for the entire performance because Dena Davida sat down right next to her and it would have been kind of awkward to leave in the middle of the performance – this is not to imply that the only reason Ms. Chouinard stuck around was because of Ms. Davida, because Je is pretty gosh darn good, but every other time that I have been in a black box with Ms. Chouinard watching something artistic, she has bolted long before the performance was over, unless it was one of her’s. But I digress.
Then I kept thinking about her participation in The Big Bang at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and figure now is as good of a time as any to spill what’s been inside of me on and about The Golden Mean (Live).
So before I forget how, first a bit of humorous verse about
Marie Chouinard’s The Golden Mean (Live)
Marie Chouinard’s The Golden Mean (Live)
Might have been better if done as a shuck and jive.
Real Pixar lamps, some video screens and masked dancers
Lead to more questions than answers.
Zombies stretching” is how I described the dancers movements
There are numerous things that I can think of that would make for improvements.
The only thing I really liked was the woman with the four sided mask
It was almost as good as the art of Karen Trask.
I‘ll have more to say, not in rhyme, but in prose
Somehow rhyming is difficult when holding your nose.
It actually wasn’t that horrible. It’s just that when writing in rhyming couplets I tend to make everything black or white. No shades of gray, whatsoever. It isn’t like I walked out in the middle of the performance or anything.
But getting to the meat of the matter, I imagine that somewhere Ms. Chouinard believes in her heart that The Golden Mean (Live) is truly saying something. Unfortunately it is in a language that I have an extremely hard time understanding.
Also in perusing the press kit, while the piece itself may be named after a mathematical principle (A+B is to A, as A is to B) the piece itself doesn’t seem to be as rigorous. I read reviews where it was danced by 10 dancers in one place and 11 dancers in another and in Montreal there were a total of 14 dancers on stage. And as long as I’m going on about the press kit, there were nine photocopied articles in Spanish, Italian, German and Dutch. I’m not entirely certain what the point was. While I’d like to think of myself as a polyglot, in fact I am really just an old and fat opinionated American, commonly referred to as a Tête carrée here in Quebec. The idea that I can really understand four other languages, when I have a hard enough time wrapping my tongue around la langue de Moliere is just kind of silly and a waste of paper.
As long as I am nitpicking, according to Ms. Chouinard the dancers put on masks of the head of state of whatever country they are performing in. But it seems that when they were in Amsterdam last summer someone forgot to tell them that Jan Peter Balkenende had been defeated and resigned, and while technically still Prime Minister, was not the man in charge. It also might account for why it wasn’t performed in Brussels.
And while the catwalk is integral to the performance, in order to, as she told Catherine Lalonde of Le Devoir, get the dancers as close as possible to the audience, to literally penetrate the theatre. [J'avais envie de voir les danseurs au plus pres du public, de faire pénétrer dans l'espace de la salle.] But when it was preformed in Venice there was no catwalk, and it is because of that performance that Tanz magazine named Carole Prieur dancer of the year.
So obviously when you (or I) go to see The Golden Mean (Live), what you see and what I see are not going to be the same thing. I’m still trying to figure out if that’s a good or a bad thing.
But enough about the background and the nitpicking over details gleaned from the press kit. What about the dance itself? And the even more importantly the dancers? I’d love to be able to tell you what Mark Eden-Towle, Eve Garnier, Benjamin Kamino, Leon Kuperschmid, Lucy M. May, Lucie Mongrain, Mariusz Ostrowski, Carol Prieur, Gérard Reyes, Dorotea Saykaly and James Viveiros did and how they moved. But unfortunately since they were all masked, I have no freaking clue as to who did what. Although after the fact I did realize that it was Carol Prieur who did the unmasked solo.
Depending on where we are in the performance, the dancers are either all wearing some moth-eaten blonde wig with a kind of plastic face shield, occasionally with some hipster glass frames. Or they are wearing photographs of people that have been glued to something like foamcore to keep it rigid. There’s one set that was all Stephen Harper, another set that was a bunch of “old people,” and a third that was all of infants.
It was the infants that I particularly didn’t like, as when the dancers were wearing those masks, they were completely naked. My first thought was did Ms. Chouinard get permission from the parents of the infants before slapping their faces on masks? My second thought was what’s the point? When they had the masks of the infants on, nobody did much of anything. If it was for shock value, it didn’t work at the performance I was at. If it was to make the audience uncomfortable, I’m fairly certain that there were some people in the audience who were made uncomfortable, but it wasn’t a majority, and most people were very polite about it.
Then much later, I went to see The Big Bang at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (I told you that I’d get around to it) in which Ms. Chouinard had some work. That work was four photographs of her dancers with the infant masks on. Apparently she was influenced by an incense burner which she likened to developing genitalia of fetuses. One of the many problems with it was that the crotches of the dancers were very much obscured. Using the lingo of the day, it was a #totalfail. It was made even curiouser because there is a dancer in The Golden Mean (Live) who imitates Marc Quinn’s sculpture Sphinx (Road to Enlightenment) which is at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal.
Marc Quinn's Sphinx (Road to Enlightenment)
Then at another point, some of them suck in their stomachs just like the statue by Mr. Quinn, and it isn’t pretty. So while the museum asked her to be influenced by a piece that they have (I think it’s a loan, and not part of the permanent collection) she just got confused or something. Another thing that struck me about the masks that were pictures of faces, was that for whatever reason, she had not chosen the picture of anyone who wasn’t Caucasian.
As I mentioned in the verse, an awful lot of the dancing was what I would liken to zombie stretching. Sometimes there was some undulating and Carole Prieur’s solo was what I called “tribal” or “voodoo.” There were a couple of times when two dancers would do something that suggested sex, but was more violent than erotic.
No matter how hard I tried, I really couldn’t put a finger on anything that would unify the whole piece. It didn’t come across as movement for movement’s sake. It sure as shooting didn’t have a plot. There weren’t any incredibly breathtakingly beautiful moments (or movements). In writing this, I am struck how it seems to me as a disparate collection of things that Ms. Chouinard wanted to copy. From the Pixar lamps, to the Quinn statue, I can easily see how each scene could have been copped from some image that she had taken, and then most fruit these days, grafted on to the performance.
It would be an interesting exercise to go through Ms. Chouinard’s sketch book (or the equivalent) while watching The Golden Mean (Live), it would kind of like this:
So there you have it. The Golden Mean (Live) isn’t a bad piece, it’s more of a blah piece. Nothing remarkable, good or bad. it sort of sits in my memory taking up space, and with a little luck that memory will inform future stuff better and worse.
Who would’ve thunk? I kind of like it… OK, let me back track slightly. On January 27th, I went to see Vertical Road by the Akram Khan Company at Theatre Maisonneuve. The company was brought into town as part of the Danse Danse series (who also somehow forgot to give me a press kit, but I digress). In short they were pretty gosh darn amazing. In my notes I wrote “very cool,” “wicked cool!” “I’m riveted,” “Wow!!” and “She’s Amazing!” You get the idea.
In mulling things over, I wasn’t quite certain how or what I was going to write. It’s always easier to write something sarcastic and negative than it is to write something that praises. But then I started to do some cursory research, and one thing that stuck out like a sore thumb to me was how the whole shebang was sponsored by Colas. In the program they had even gone so far as to give some guy named Hervé Le Bouc a full page to explain how his company ended up being partnered with the Akram Khan Company.
I only had one small question. Who, or what was Colas? As it turns out, they are a French company that builds roads (or as they write in the program: Roads). As I wrote up above, “I kind of like it.” It being the idea that some industrial engineering company is paying some kind of coin (and I would imagine and hope that it is some serious coin if they are getting a full page in the program) so that contemporary British dance can be seen.
So it now becomes self-evident here the name of the dance comes from. Unfortunately I wasn’t invited to the dinner with M. Le Bouc and Mr. Khan so I can’t comment on whether M. Le Bouc had any other input into how the dance was created, or if he participated in any other way. Personally, I’d like to think that M. Le Bouc was a big dance fan going way back, and that over dinner he and Mr. Khan hit it off like a house on fire, brainstorming ideas ’till the cows came home. Then after they had become BFF, Akram (after all they gotta be on a first name basis by now) blurts out to Hervé “I know I’ll make a dance for your company!”
I also think it would be great if some of our local engineering firms that built roads (or other things) started sponsoring localdancecompanies. But somehow, I don’t see that happening for a while. Pity.
Despite not getting a press kit (me, obsessive? nah.) I was able to suss out that Vertical Road is supposed to be some kind of spiritual dance. Mr. Khan is quoted in the program as saying it is “the journey from gravity to grace.” But I’m not entirely clear on what that means, exactly. Is he referring to the force of attraction? Heaviness or weight? Seriousness or importance? Or something else. And grace has equally many definitions, none of which are exactly antonyms of gravity. In fact, riffing off of the seriousness definition you could almost make a point that gravity and grace were synonymous. Almost.
But back to the point at hand, the performance. In reading about it (after the fact) just about everyone seems to talk about Vertical Road as a journey by one person. That did not come across as strongly as you would think during the performance. Salah El Brogy definitely was the “lead.” But there was enough other stuff happening that the idea of a journey really only occurred to me after I read about it and then kinda nodded my head and said to myself (quietly) “yeah, I can see that…”
To me it was much more of a group piece done in about eight separate scenes, beginning and ending quite dramatically with a scrim. At the beginning, I couldn’t quite tell if there was one or two people behind it, and then I figured out that it was only one person, Mr. El Brogy – who I referred to as “the hairy dude” in my notes – because he placed various body bits on it in a kind of shadow play. But what was most impressive to me was how he banged it, like a gong or something, with his hand and it rippled like a vertical lake. At the end he goes back to the shadow play and when the scrim drops the show is over.
For the six other scenes, there is lots of running, jumping, spinning and the like. While I was watching I thought there were some similarities to various martial arts like kung-fu. But while doing some cursory research I came across this article from The Guardian that informed me that
Khan’s dance roots are in kathak – and it shows. It’s a style characterised by mathematically complex rhythmic footwork, spins, fluid arm and hand gestures, as well as dynamic contrasts between speed and stillness.
I also saw some similarities to the Dhikr performed by the Mevlevi Order (as I wrote that I was sticking out my chest proudly, showing off my madd wikipedia skillz!). In plainer language there were some bits that reminded me of Whirling Dervishes.
And if I remember correctly, I read someplace that Mr. Khan is a Sufi, and the whirling dervishes are also Sufi.
But then my theory starts to fall apart when I also noted that certain bits of the show reminded me of Loie Fuuller.
And no matter how hard I try I can’t make any connections between a 19th century American vaudeville performer and Mr. Khan. Other strange visions that jumped onto my head during the performance were of American football referees.
Touchdown!!
And Chinese terracotta warriors (mainly due to the incredible amount of talcum powder that was on their costumes and how solidly they stood at in the second and third scenes). In what I’m calling the third scene there’s a wicked cool back and forth that I would call a duet except that all eight dancers are on stage doing stuff. Where the shortest woman in the company (sorry but my memory is not good to begin with and since I didn’t get a press kit, trying to figure out if it was Eulalia Ayguade Farro, Konstandina Efthymiadou or Yen-Ching Lin is beyond my abilities – suffice it to say that they all are pretty gosh darn amazing dancers) does a kind of puppet and puppet master dance with Mr. El Brogy (aka the Hairy Dude) made even more spectacular because at various points they trade positions and that who was the puppet becomes the puppet master and vice versa.
It because of things like that, where Mr. Khan plays fast and loose with whatever plot there is, in order to wow and impress the audience with movement that caused me to that there wasn’t much of a path happening.
Some other brief thoughts I had were that while I have never been to Burning Man, the performance was very Burning Man-esque. Sort of like a 21st century version of transcendental meditation done while throwing bodies through space. And while looking up the dancers on the internet I discovered that Ms. Ayguade Farro also danced in the Hofesh Schecter company and immediately recognized the similarities in style between the two.
I should also mention Ahmed Khemis, Yen-Ching Lin, Andrej Petrovic and Elias Lazaridis. Just because they didn’t get anything that I would call a solo does not in anyway mean that they were anything less than kick-ass and amazing dancers. They were and are, and I can only hope that when I grow up that I can dance half as well as they can.
Dancers explaining
At which point I’ve gone way over any reasonable word count and should probably attempt to wrap this up somehow. An easy way? Next time the Akram Khan company shows up in your town, go buy tickets.
Back on December 14th I was wandering around downtown (don’t ask me why I was hanging with the Christmas shoppers) and realized I had not been to the Hudson’s Bay Gallery before. It’s on the 5th floor of The Bay. And it was weird and wonderful.
The entrance to the Hudson's Bay Gallery.
Cool Door Handles.
A wooden pig.
Yup, that’s right, a wooden pig, with the various cuts of meat clearly marked.
The other side of the pig.
Front of the pig.
Two pigs.
At some point I need to find out where Hutton’s was. And why their models are in the Bay now. Then after I’ve solved that mystery, I’m going to have to make myself one (or maybe, two) just because I don’t already have enough useless stuff gathering dust in my apartment.
A hat.
The hat in context.
And you thought fashion only got funky in the 70s? The mock up of the store is supposed to recreate what Morgan’s looked like in 1894.
A bear.
A scale (and it still works!)
Graphic representation of how the British plundered the world.
On Monday I was invited to the press conference for the Festival TransAmériques. It took place in the studios for ARTV at Places des Arts, a weird little room that was a far cry from where they used to do it (l’Agora des Sciences at UQAM). I don’t know if their budget had been cut or if they had spontaneously decided to shake things up. But either way the room was jam packed.
The view from my seat at the Festival TransAmériques press conference.
I’m torn between loving press conferences and hating them. I love them because they make you feel special. Press kits have all sorts of information that you otherwise wouldn’t know. In Montreal the press conferences tend to offer free food and drink. I hate press conferences because there are more significant and better ways to feel special. Once you’ve been to a bunch of press conferences on the same subject you tend to find mistakes and holes in the press kit. And the free food and drink isn’t always the best.
Anyhows, this one was notable because (as I’ve mentioned) it was in a new venue. They also couldn’t give me a press kit, and the food and drink consisted of bottled orange juice and cupcakes (they also were serving coffee, tea, bottled water and bottled apple juice).
The cupcakes (and tea and bottled water) at the press conference for Festival TransAmériques.
Despite my love/hate relationship with press conferences one thing that you always get at a press conference is a lot of “blah, blah, blah.”
Sorry about the camera shake. I really wish people would learn that reading from a script is incredibly bad and completely stultifying. It gets worse when they don’t really have much to say.
Since I don’t really follow Francophone Quebecois Theatre, I had no idea (and since I didn’t get a press kit, still don’t know) who Olivier Choinière is or what he has done. But apparently it’s a big deal that the Festival TransAmériques is re-staging his Chante avec moi. If I caught it correctly, it’s a play with 50 performers. For whatever reason M. Choinière decided to recite all of their names during the press conference. It only occurred to me about halfway through the list how bizarre that was, so I only caught about the last third on camera. Sorry.
But then, every now and again you get something that makes it all worthwhile to be at the press conference.
Getting to hear a choreographer explain the stuff behind something they are making, five months in advance of when you’re going to get to see it, is kind of cool. Thankfully I had my wits about me enough that I was able to film her whole speech (again, sorry for the camera shake, you’d be amazed at how heavy a 20 oz. camera can get when you’re holding it away from you body for 4 minutes and 19 seconds).
But this one got even better.
They decided that they’d get Bernard Martin and Karina Champoux to perform. I’m looking forward to trying to memorize this little bit and then see if it actually makes it into the performance.
Also, if Danièle Desnoyers happens to come across this. (If you didn’t watch the video or can’t understand French – basically her dance is about nightlife in Montreal in the 40s and 50s. She’s much more nuanced than that, which is why I filmed her doing the talking. The title translates as Beneath the Skin, The Night) Besides Montreal Confidential by Al Palmer there is also Montreal by Gaslight by Anonymous which covers much of the same material but from a perspective sixty years earlier.
Then because press conferences are held for very specific purposes, I think that the information they wanted to get out to the public was this (remember, I didn’t get a press kit): This year’s festival starts on the 24th of May. It ends on June 9, 2012. Five shows have been announced. Two different ones by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s company Rosas (pity that they couldn’t have coordinated the festival with Beyoncé’s performance in town, that would have been awesome!) Cesena and En Atendant, On the Concept of the Face, regarding the Son of God, by someone I have never heard of and the previously mentioned performances by Olivier Choinière and Danièle Desnoyers.
Tickets are on sale for the five shows as of January 30th. The Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker show at Place des Arts (the only show for which I asked about prices) tops out at $61 plus taxes plus service charges. But when I asked to see what seats were available it looked like most of the kick-ass seats had been held back for subscribers who will be getting their crack at the end of March. Apparently there is a 10% discount if you buy your tickets now. But I also imagine that there is some sort of discount if you subscribe, and I would guess that it might be even larger than 10%.
And in conclusion, if you’d like to read/see/hear what the other media outlets had to say about the press conference click on the links.
Late last year I was wandering around through the bowels of our fair city and was struck by the fact that Les Cours Mont Royal‘s Christmas decorations were not only made out of various things (mostly old 2 litre soda bottles) that had been recycled, but the fact that they weren’t making such a big deal out of it and trumpeting that they were super cool and the bestest because of their design choices. Super props and kudos to whomever does the displays for Les Cours Mont Royal, along with some extra points for choosing to stay anonymous.
A giant green snowman made out of recycled soda bottles.
A giant green snowman made out of recycled soda bottles.
A giant green snowman made out of recycled soda bottles.
The head of a giant green snowman made out of recycled soda bottles.
A different perspective on a giant green snowman made out of recycled soda bottles.
A wreath made out of recycled soda bottles.
Close up of a wreath made out of recycled soda bottles.
Something that I think is half of the shilouette of a Christmas tree made out of recycled soda bottles.
Rudolph made out of recycled soda bottles.
The outline of a Christmas tree made out of recycled soda bottles.
A Christmas tree made out of recycled soda bottles.
While I normally am dead-set against most things commercial, I found this particular tree quite witty. Using the bags of the stores in Les Cours Mont Royal as “ornaments” was a great idea.
The giant snowman made out of recycled soda bottles seen from above.
