École de danse contemporaine de Montréal
Dana Gingras + Lucie Grégoire
ÉDIFICE WILDER | ESPACE ORANGE
DECEMBER 18-21, 2024 - 7PM
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Discussion with the artists on December 19
Dana Gingras + Lucie Grégoire
Échos contemporains
Échos contemporains features third-year performers from l’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal with an excerpt from Frontera by Dana Gingras. The first-year cohort, in their first performance as part of the training program, will present a work from Lucie Grégoire’s repertoire.
Frontera (excerpt) by Dana Gingras
Frontera (border, frontier): a real or imaginary dividing line; the extreme limit of understanding in a particular area. In an era of aggressive nationalism and corporate mass surveillance, the human body has never been rendered so visible, subject to increasingly invasive forms of industrial-scale oversight and processing. Borders are boundaries, but they’re also processes, liminal spaces where despair, desire and neoliberal economic imperatives meet the obscure(d) operations of power. Surveillance technologies represent an advancing frontier of knowledge and control, monitoring movement, defining identities, and gathering data. Increasingly, the border moves with the body, and seeks to organize and orchestrate its passage through the world. Featuring original music by Fly Pan Am and field recordings by Godspeed’s Dave Bryant, Frontera‘s dancers navigate spaces of inclusion and exclusion, their bodies mapped in high resolution, their destinies unresolved.
Work from the repertoire of Lucie Grégoire
Artistic and program director Lisa Davies
Creation and performance advisor Isabelle Poirier, Emmanuelle Bourassa-Beaudoin
Third-year dancers Clara Biernacki, Iban Bourgoin, Oly Dion, Ludovic Germain-Thivierge, Ezra Guerrier, Alice Larrière, Michelle Lucero Moris, Kate Manns, Jane Millette, Apolline Saulnier, Hortense Sierka, Clara Truong, Clara Urquhart
First-year dancers Niko Alevizakis, Simon Armeni-Crowe, Simone Beck-Haviernick, Marie-Laure Bonneau, Agathe Bouydron, Colette Buttet, Marcela Calandria, Maude Carbonneau, Cloe Comstock, Éloïse Dupont, Samuel Duvall, Julia Gauthier, Anouk Graux, Maëlys Hardy, Julia Henry, Justine Heude, Oleksiy Kioresku, Vincent Lacasse, Béatrice Mathieu, Inès Olivieri, Nora Paquet, Méliane Perreault, Eufémia Pongitore, Audrey Senff, Renaud Tremblay
Dana Gingras is a choreographer, filmmaker, performer, and teacher. Her 30-year career has moved across mediums and artistic practices and has established her as a game-changing, boundary-pushing artist. She co-founded The Holy Body Tattoo in 1993, a company that changed the landscape of Canadian dance, earning numerous awards and honours for its stage and film work. Through Animals of Distinction, based in Tio’tià:ke/Montréal, she has fostered the creation of cutting-edge multimedia works with innovative collaborations that most recently include Group A (another, 2018), Godspeed You! Black Emperor (monumental, 2016; Creation Destruction, 2022), Fly Pan Am (Frontera, 2019) and United Visual Artists (Frontera, 2019; Creation Destruction, 2022; Ensemble, 2023). Her work has been performed at some of the most prestigious festivals and venues in the world, including the Adelaide Festival, Luminato Festival in Toronto, the Edinburgh International Festival, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the ROMAEUROPA Festival, Barbican Hall in London, Sydney Festival in Australia, MONA FOMA Festival in Tasmania, CTM Festival Berlin, Festival TransAmériques in Montréal, and PuSh Festival Vancouver. Dana was awarded the long-term artist in residency at Centre de Création O Vertigo from 2017-2019 and is an associate artist of the National Arts Centre of Canada.
An influential figure in contemporary dance in Québec, choreographer and dancer Lucie Grégoire has carried out her singular artistic research since 1981, realizing more than 40 creations: solos, site-specific performances, and ensemble pieces presented in Canada and Europe, New York, Tunisia, and Japan. Her works probe the depths of the female universe and find sources of inspiration in the wild landscapes of the Arctic, the Sahara, the Amazon rainforest and Iceland, as well as in literature, visual art and film. Her 10-year creation cycle with Japanese choreographer and dancer Yoshito Ohno led to a trilogy co-produced by Agora de la danse. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Lucie Grégoire Danse in 2016, the solo inspired by Paul Auster’s novel Les Choses dernières (1994) was recreated and danced by Isabelle Poirier. In 2017, the importance of this work in Québec’s choreographic heritage was recognized by the creation of a Boîte chorégraphique in the collection of the Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault. She has been teaching since 1989 at l’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal.
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