How does one inhabit a pose? Evoking Butoh and art modelling, Hélène is looking to reach a meditative state that she shares with the audience in this online performance. In a room where walls and ceiling disappear, she creates a neutral space, at once nowhere and everywhere. Based on imaginary and sensitive impulses, she allows her body to be so that it can become a work of art, a landscape. Minimalist gestures, slowness, movement repetitions and a waltz with tempo establish a non-time, or a return to a universal time.
Choreographer and performer Hélène Messier
Rehearsal directors David Rancourt, Annie Gagnon, James Viveiros
Composer Vincent Gagnon
Costume designer Julie Pichette
Through SOIE, I became interested in the attentive presence oriented toward inner impulses as a means to nourish spiritual experiences. For me, the spiritual is a quest of profound understanding by the intelligence of feeling of the fundamental essence of human beings in their relation to the world. What I convey in SOIE is this very quest. I explore it through notions of contemplation, of attentive presence, of laying bare, of openness between the world and my own intimacy. Strongly inspired by meditation, Butoh, and live modeling, SOIE is an introspective moment experienced from sculptural postures, as well as minimal, subtle, delicate or repetitive movements embodied because of an inner necessity. Laid bare, the body is simultaneously nature, landscape, and vehicle for something bigger.
Hélène Messier was trained in Butoh, mainly by Mario Veillette, and has also studied with the following teachers: Denyse Fujiwara, Paul Ibey, Jocelyne Montpetit, Yoshito, Ohno, Diego Pinon, Martine Viale, and Yumiko Yoshioka. She has had the opportunity to dance for Mario Veillette, Katia-Marie Germain, and Ample Man Danse Company. She is currently engaged in a creative process with Sara Dell’ava. She also collaborates several times with Manuel Shink and Clarisse Delatour. Having completed a Bachelor’s degree in Choreography at Concordia University, her creative work is based on the sensitive imagination, accessing different states, as well as somatic work, creating deep, sensitive, and poetic worlds. Her creations have been presented at Short and Sweet (FTA), Danses Buissonnières, Piss in the Pool, and Quartiers Danses. Hélène completed her Master’s in Dance at UQAM, studying the relationship between a presence that is attentive to internal impulses and the experience of the spiritual in her practice of Butoh. She has also been practicing mindfulness meditation for about ten years, in addition to working as an artist’s model for four years. These practices also form part of her artistic approach and nourish her spiritual quest.
An artist in dance, David Rancourt has mainly been a performer since graduating from LADMMI. His work with many choreographers brings him to experience a wide range of visions of art and movement, and allows him to dance on both local, national, and international stages. He collaborates with artists Alan Lake, Pierre-Paul Savoie and Annie Gagnon, and on projects with Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, Aurélie Pedron and Ariane Boulet. Passionate about the arts of movement and breath, he has been practicing the Continuum with Linda Rabin and Qi Gong with Marie-Claude Rodrigue for more than fifteen years. He is also part of the Fragments Libres school team. As a creator, his choreographic works take several forms: Temps / espace, an installation and performance as part of the first anniversary of Maison pour la danse in Québec City; and several short forms that fit into three PPS Danse productions: Chairs, Dance Lhasa Dance, and Body, Love, Anarchy Leo Ferré. As an outside eye and artistic advisor, let’s mention his collaborations with Edgar Zendejas at Ezdanza and with Myriam Allard and Hedi Graja from La Otra Orilla.
