Louise Lecavalier/Fou glorieux (Montreal)

Alain Lortie – Lighting Designer

Alain Lortie has pursued his chosen career with passion for over thirty years. First associated with multidisciplinary artists Michel Lemieux, Marie Chouinard, and Édouard Lock, he went on to collaborate with Québécois and European singers Jean-Pierre Ferland, Diane Dufresne, Robert Charlebois, Daniel Bélanger, Peter Gabriel, Francis Cabrel, and Eros Ramazzotti. Named Lighting Designer of the Year several times at the ADISQ Awards, he also received the Masque for Best Lighting for Les âmes mortes (1996) and the Dora Mavor Moore Prize in Toronto for Œdipus Rex (1997). From 2001 to 2005, Alain was artistic director of the Celebration of Light at the Montreal High Lights Festival. He designed the lighting for several musicals in Asia, as well as two permanent circus productions for Shanghai Circus World: Era (2005) and Kaleido (2010). Among Alain’s major achievements are Starmania (1993), NotreDame de Paris (1998), Arturo Brachetti (1999), Cavalia (2003), and Odysseo (2011). His work with the Cirque de Soleil includes Soleil de minuit (2004), Delirium (2006), Zarkana (2011), and Toruk, the first flight! (2015), which was inspired by the James Cameron film, Avatar. In addition, Alain collaborated with Franco Dragone in the Han Show in Wuhan, China, in 2014.

Antoine Berthiaume – Original Music and Arrangements

Antoine Berthiaume, a Montrealer, is a composer and guitarist active in the fields of improvisation, contemporary music, dance, and theatre. His work has been enriched by collaborations with artists such as Gilles Poulin-Denis, Mélanie Demers, Annie Gagnon, Thierry Huard, Aurélie Pedron, Audrey Bergeron, Louis-Élyan Martin, Jessica Serli, Alan Lake, and Louise Lecavalier, as well as with Cavalia and Cirque du Soleil. Antoine’s music features on dozens of albums on the Ambiances Magnétiques, Audiogram, Vos Records (Japan), Incus Records (U.K.), Saint-Cécile, Sony, and Starkland (U.S.A.) labels. A contributor to Classical Guitar Magazine, Antoine just completed his PhD in digital music at l’Université de Montréal under Robert Normandeau.

Colin Stetson – Music

Colin Stetson was born and raised in Ann Harbor, Michigan; spent a decade in San Francisco and Brooklyn honing his formidable talents as a horn player, eventually settling in Montreal in 2007. Over the years he has worked extensively live and in studio with a wide range of bands and musicians including Tom Waits, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, TV On The Radio, Feist, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Bill Laswell, Evan Parker,The Chemical Brothers, Animal Collective, Hamid Drake, LCD Soundsystem, The National, Angelique Kidjo, Fink, and David Gilmore. Meanwhile he has developed an utterly unique voice as a soloist, principally on saxophones and clarinets, his intense technical prowess matched by his exhilarating and emotionally gripping skills as a songwriter. Stetson’s astounding physical engagement with his instruments (chiefly bass and alto saxophones) produces emotionally rich and polyphonic compositions that transcend expectations of what solo horn playing can sound like. Stemming from that approach and aesthetic, he has been contributing regularly to the world of film, TV, and game scoring over the past decade with such titles as Hereditary, The First, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Color Out of Space.

Sunns and Jerusalem In My Heart – Music

At the beginning of November 2012, Suuns (Ben Shemie, Liam O’Neil, Max Henry and Joseph Yarmush) and long-time friend, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, of Jerusalem in My Heart, rented a studio in Montreal for seven days. The idea was to collaborate on rough sketches of song ideas and to complete as much recording as possible without discrimination. The session was successful, yielding many vibe-laden songs featuring heavy analog synths, Arabic influences and electronic sensibilities. 

After the session, the recordings laid dormant. Both bands were releasing albums, and touring was to ensue shortly. Some editing time was squeezed in between tour dates but a full year passed before an audience heard the songs. The collaborative band did a live show at Pop Montreal 2013, then another the following March after which the project began to move forward. The band over dubbed and reworked the songs in the summer of 2014 and finally, while on tour in October, finished the vocal overdubs and mixing. Moumneh did the tracking and most of the mixing while Max Henry of Suuns handled some mixing as well. The album “Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart” was released on April 13, 2015.

The live show is very much a performance with less emphasis on replaying the recordings note for note, but more about recreating the excitement of the initial recording sessions. The band toured select markets in North America, in support of the release, including a performance in their hometown of Montreal, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. They also toured extensively in Europe, performing at Le Guess Who? Festival in the Netherlands, at Sonic City in Belgium, at ATP Festival in the UK, including headline shows in Istanbul and Beirut.

Teho Teardro and Blixa Bargeld – Music

Teho Teardo lives in Rome and is a musician, composer and sound designer. He created the soundtracks for several movies by Oscar winning directors Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriele Salvatores. He won various prizes for his music, such as the Ennio Morricone and David Di Donatello Prizes.

Blixa Bargeld was born in 1959 in West Berlin. He is an autodidact and works as a singer, writer, composer and director. He was the guitarist with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds for more than 10 years and is Head and Founder of Einstürzende Neubauten since 1980. Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten will release a new album in May 2020 with a concert tour of Europe and North America.

Three years after their debut album Still Smiling, Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld returned with a completely new work.

Often the nature of a collaboration is framed within a single episode limited in time, but this is not the case here. As a result of a special artistic and personal bond, Teho and Blixa reinvent their relationship to explore new territories.

Nerissimo is the title of this album. Its cover artwork was inspired by a painting from Hans Holbein the Younger titled The Ambassadors (1533). Embedded in the painting are enigmatic references to philosophy, religion, mortality, and illusion, which connect to some of the themes in the album.

The word “nerissimo” is the Italian superlative for black (“the blackest”) and there is something very black about the music on this record. However that doesn’t mean, that it is “dark”—a genre commonly referred to in music. The colour black contains all colours and the music contains a multitude of possibilities. The title song Nerissimo opens the album in its English version and closes it with the Italian version, bracketing the album like bookends.

France Bruyère – Rehearsal Director and Assistant Choreographer

Classically trained, France Bruyère quickly widened her field of interest to include contemporary and jazz dance. After her professional debut at age seventeen with Groupe Nouvelle Aire in Montreal, she danced for numerous choreographers and with several dance companies which, besides Nouvelle Aire, included Groupe Axis, the Louise Latreille dance troupe, Pointépiénu, and the Danny Grossman Dance Company in Toronto. After working as rehearsal director for La La La Human Steps for ten years, she taught at UQAM until 2017 and works for Louise Lecavalier as artistic assistant and rehearsal director.

Justine A. Chambers

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist living on the traditional and ancestral Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her practice considers choreography as an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother. https://justineachambers.com/