Les jolies choses (The Pretty Things)
November 22 & 23, 2024 | 8pm
Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton Street)
Running time: 55 minutes (no intermission)
Compagnie Catherine Gaudet (Montreal)
The power of endurance and exhaustion, of bodies sodden with effort, but somehow continuing is the raw material of Montreal choreographer Catherine Gaudet. Synchronized, metronomic rhythms offer no means of respite, but inside these mechanistic rituals something else begins to emerge.
Gaudet’s work presents the body as a contested site, a place of divergent, often contradictory demands. In Les jolies choses (The Pretty Things), this fascination with extremity evolves into choreographic work that operates on a visceral level. Within the broader context of performance, both dancers and audience are active participants, as the body itself becomes the spectacle.
As the rigorous repetition of Gaudet’s choreographic language draws forth a state of shared empathy and catharsis, the mandatory conformity and cohesion of the machine are challenged. The gaudy stuff of cheap entertainment falls away, and what is left is the broken poetry of human struggle. Fragile, desperate, and achingly beautiful.
Co-produced by: Festival TransAmériques + Agora de la danse + Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen + Réseau CanDance (Toronto) + Centre national des Arts (Ottawa) + Harbourfront Center (Toronto) + DLD-Daniel Léveillé Danse
“A dance that oscillates between the civilized world and the space of impulses, where the bodies are in turn subjected to social constraints and then to a burst of animality and sensuality.” – La pointe
“Gaudet fascinates, astonishes and destabilizes with her choreographic proposals, which often involve the repetition of gestures and the modulation of bodies until the surface of things crack." – La Presse
Catherine Gaudet
After completing a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in contemporary dance at UQAM, Catherine Gaudet established from the outset a reputation as a choreographer with a strong, distinctive style. Slipping under the mask of social conventions, she tracks down the convulsive movements of the subconscious in the body, the micro movements that reveal emotions and sensations we try to hide. Obsessed by the quest for existential truth and well-being, she plunges into the meanderings of the psyche, finding beauty in flaws in contradictions. Her state of dance emerges from opposing forces that constrain and control her tormented characters. Her raw yet precise physicality is complemented by a theatricality that subtly combines absurd dramatic tensions with black humour. In parallel to her creative activities, she was a founding member of the company Lorganisme from 2010 to 2019; co-director of the Centre de création O’ Vertigo; guest professor at the Département de danse de l’UQAM in 2018-2019 as well as a lecturer at the same institution, from 2019 to 2021. Catherine is currently the artistic and general director of the Compagnie Catherine Gaudet, a member of Circuit-Est center chorégraphique, associate creator at DLD – Daniel Léveillé Danse and associate artist at the Agora de la danse.
Top image: Compagnie Catherine Gaudet, Les jolies choses (The Pretty Things) © Donastas Alisauskas.
