The Press at the 81st Venice Film Festival | Aquatic Nature

(Venice) At the Venice Film Festival, two Quebec works selected in the Venice Immersive section, A water at nightby Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin and Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, and Telos Iby Dorotea Saykaly and Emil Dam Seidel, transcend the boundaries of dance.

A few meters from the west coast of the Lido, where the Venice Film Festival takes place, is the smallest of the three islands of this coastal strip, the Lazarretto Vecchio. This is where the Venice Immersive section has been held since 2017. This year, Michel Reilhac and Liz Rosenthal, programmers of Venice Immersive, have selected 63 immersive works from 25 countries. Among them, A water at nighta short film in virtual reality (VR) by Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin and Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, invites the viewer to let themselves be gently rocked by the movements of 15 aquatic creatures invading a public swimming pool at night.

“Originally, it was Oriane Morriet who wanted to create an underwater dance project, then she approached Caroline as a choreographer,” explained Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin, who was encountered on the small Venetian island and was proud to announce thatA water at nightsuperbly photographed by Pierre Mainville, was acquired by a European distributor.

“It was in 2018, when I released the piece Groundwhere I was working on trampolines. Oriane, who was a journalist at the time, approached me right away. It was great, this idea of ​​underwater choreography in VR, but I needed a team that knew VR and with whom I could collaborate on the production,” continued Caroline Laurin-Beaucage.

The choreographer then met the director. From January 2019, they worked on what would become Bodies of Water (A water at night): “There were several iterations because even if there was a basic scenario, when you work with a medium like dance, it is by working experientially that the work is constructed, that you see the material emerge,” explained the choreographer.

It was while working together at the pool that the two directors reworked the script, exploited the full cinematic potential of the pool’s architecture and got to know the dancers. They then shot a first version with a small, lower-quality camera in order to obtain subsidies.

Far removed from the aesthetics of artistic swimming choreographies, the one created by Caroline Laurin-Beaucage focuses not on buoyancy, but on the verticality of bodies that defy the water, hit it with their fists, let themselves sink into it, crawl along the bottom of the pool, climb its walls.

“So I wanted to play with this duality, hence the importance of working with dancers and not swimmers, of working on gestures and not on forms,” ​​revealed the choreographer.

“The idea that came up often when creating the project was that we are bodies of water,” explained Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin. In her book Bodies of WaterAstrida Neimanis reflects on what our body would be like if we thought of it as something other than flesh and bone, but rather as a watery mass. These bodies try to tame water, to become one with it. Even at the sound level, where everything was created in the studio, we wanted water to become a character.

With their eyes closed, except in a few scenes to create a dramatic effect, the dancers move in a peaceful dreamlike world, appearing and disappearing according to the fluid editing of Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin and Alain Baril.

“For me, it was important because we wanted to tell something even if it comes through dance, emotion and metaphor. The editing helped the narrative curve. In VR, you can’t do quick editing like in cinema so that the audience can experience the space. The idea of ​​appearances and disappearances came during the editing. We found it unusual to do editing in VR, but when we came here, we discovered that it has become the norm,” concluded Chélanie Beaudin-Quintin, who hopes thatA water at night will soon be accessible to the Quebec public.

From Cannes to Venice

Seven years after the Venice Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival has inaugurated its Immersive Competition section, directed by Elie Levasseur. Thanks to its success there, the installation Telos Iby Montreal choreographer and dancer Dorotea Saykaly and Danish director Emil Dam Seidel, has been selected for Venice Immersive.

“Cannes was the first time we saw all the elements of the installation together. The experience was very formative for us. For Venice, with Michel Reilhac and Liz Rosenthal, we made some changes to make the experience more focused. The reception was very good in Venice,” explained the directors, reached by email.

Inspired by mythology and science fiction, a work of hypnotic beautyTelos I features an artificial intelligence (Dorotea Saykaly) who, after the extinction of humanity, finds a reason to exist by creating a body for herself.

Locked in a dark room, enveloped in an atonal soundtrack, the spectator is invited to observe in turn the four facets of a glass pyramid, placed on a rectangular column, on which, in holographic projection, the artist performs four different choreographies. By her way of moving, the dancer appears like a tiny and fragile creature that tames, slowly but surely, her fleshly envelope.

After Cannes and Venice, Dorotea Saykaly and Emil Dam Seidel hope to be able to present Telos I very soon in Montreal: “As I am from Montreal, there is always this intention to share our work with the Quebec public. We also receive invitations from various festivals. We also think that our work could end up in museums, permanent collections. So we focus on that.”

Having previously filmed She (2022), short film directed by Emil Dam Seidel written with Dorotea Saykaly, the artist couple reveals that there could be a sequel to Telos I : “What we are discovering more and more is that together we create universes. These universes can exist and expand in different mediums. Telos II will probably be completely different and revolutionary.”