Louise Lecavalier has never been afraid of risk. And at 64, that call continues. From Thursday, the dancer will wear dozens of sensors to deliver Delusional Worlda dance and digital arts performance, with designer Lu Yang at Arsenal contemporary art gallery.
“The visual varies depending on the dancer doing the exploration,” says Louise Lecavalier in an interview. Until very recently, she did not know what music she would dance to and what type of visual she would be accompanied by.
Originally from Shanghai, Lu Yang has worked with different techniques, video, installation, animation, performance, motion capture and games.
For Louise Lecavalier, the performance they achieve together is close to video games. At the forefront, the dancer is there in flesh and blood, and her movements inspire and animate “avatars”, created by Lu Yang for the occasion.
After a big creation like Stations, where everything starts from me, I like to get involved in small projects, which show me the way
“It’s risky in the sense that I don’t know what the person is going to decide to do. It’s not like a show that’s set months in advance,” she says. The show is presented on the occasion of the 6e biennial of digital art, but the exchanges between Lecavalier and Yang were done remotely. It is also very recently that the dancer became familiar with the creatures created by Lu Yang to accompany her, a situation that is both “frustrating and stimulating”.
“Some characters look like they’re coming out of hell,” she says. There are some who have no head, or who are missing other members. However, in the choreography that she had developed beforehand, “the characters had a head, two arms, and two legs,” says Louise Lecavalier.
The show, which lasts about thirty minutes in all, therefore has its share of improvisation between the two creators. And the performance is harnessed by a whole technical apparatus, while the dancer is attached on all sides by the sensors. “I have 17 in the back of my neck alone. It’s by far the most uncomfortable costume I’ve had to put on,” she says. She also covers this technological envelope with other clothes, which make her embody different characters.
For Louise Lecavalier, this show, in which she takes part, but which she did not design, is an opportunity to take stock after the intense period of creation which culminated in Stationsa solo show that should be back in theaters soon.
“After a big creation like Stations, where everything starts from me, I like to get involved in small projects, which show me the way. Like a kind of path” that leads me somewhere else, she says. Delusional World could also be for her a “draft of something”, which will take her further in creation.
Dancing, always
Because, from the height of her age, Louise Lecavalier does not dream of stopping dancing, even if she could do it, she says, with a single word, in an instant, with a snap of her fingers.
“What makes me special is not that I dance at 64, but it’s the way I dance, which is very extreme, very demanding and very physical. Yet she doesn’t believe it’s harder for her to serve her art now than it once was. “I hurt everywhere today, but I also hurt everywhere before. »
“It was very difficult to dance at 20, she says, but not in the same way. My body, I knew less, and it was not necessarily more efficient. Maybe we try too hard to think of the body as something simple and perfect at birth that becomes less and less perfect as we get older. “If there can be peaks of performance at certain ages for athletes who constantly perform the same gesture, this is not the case for her. “For me, the challenge of dancing is always great. The joy of dancing is always great. »