One is ethereal, light, diaphanous, present, hyper-precise. It’s Louise Bedard. Choreographer (The markdown, The oval woman, In the ferns trampled by the gaze), super interpreter, 30 years of career. The other is earthy, leonine, biting, present, super-precise. It is Sarah Williams, super interpreter (Benoît Lachambre, La La La Human Steps, Jean-Pierre Perreault), 30 years of career. The two find themselves for the first time on stage, in a choreography by Catherine Gaudet who seeks to summon, if only for a second, all these lives, these faces, these masks, these personas lurking in a single body.
“Are you being asked your age? ” asked The duty to Sarah Williams and Louise Bédard. “No, slice Mme Bédard, and if you ask me, I’m going to lie to you. The question arose, however: in an art of the body and of virtuosity like dance, where the longevity of a career is short, where girls often pass in series like flashes, to endure, to age and to have hair that turns white continuing to dance on stage remains exceptional — and therefore, political.
“What has changed the most for me, compared to when I was a young dancer, is really finitude,” says Louise Bédard. I’m not young anymore, that’s for sure. When I was young, I could do certain things that I can’t do now, and I couldn’t have done then what I do now. »
She continues: “Every day, I say to myself: “Well, this may be the last time that I will do a duet. This may be the last time I dance on stage…” These thoughts have been there all the time, for a little while. »
“It brings me to a place…of humility…where I just want to be there…with what I have that day…. if I have nothing to give I have nothing to give…. So I’m going to try to tap into a little box behind my head, one of those secret cabinets…. make things circulate, in relation to the imaginary, to what crosses me. And Catherine’s work [Gaudet] allow that. »
The infinite dances
Sarah Williams smiles as she thinks back to “her young way of dancing”. What has changed the most? “The fact of continuing to explore”, she blurts out in English after a reflective silence. “Now the exploration is never over. »
“When I was young, I had this feeling that I had to come up with something finished, that wouldn’t change anymore — maybe it was the choreographers I worked with, too. Now there are more and more layers, and there are always more. »
This meeting on the Agora de la danse stage was called by Sarah Williams. She wanted to dance with Louise Bédard “because her dances are nourished by other works of art, and that intrigues me. And there are so many details in his dances; and she has different characters, different characters that appear on stage”.
Bédard, who was a dancer for Catherine Gaudet in the project Pluto of La 2e porte à gauche, in 2015, in turn asked the choreographer to compose the score. In the short minutes seen in the studio, we recognize the kind of flow of choreographic consciousness specific to Gaudet.
What has changed the most for me, compared to when I was a young dancer, is really finitude. I’m not young anymore, that’s for sure. When I was young, I could do certain things that I can’t do now, and I couldn’t have done then what I do now.
A flow, which she herself calls current, which makes it possible to bring out figures, images, energies from the unconscious — whether collective, or here specific to each of the dancers. And which makes one think, in embodied version, completely physically, of a kind of literary flow of consciousness, as practiced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce.
What are the two experienced dancers working on, in particular, in this mobile material? “Several things, and several things at the same time, answers Mr.me Williams. Similarities and differences. How do different things coexist in the same space; how different people coexist in the same space. Joy. The dance that is part of everything. Finding freedom within constraint. »
Continuous bass
Mme Bédard, for his part, “works on the body in a space that is still surrounded. Sometimes I feel like I’m not the one dancing; and I like it ; that piece is like an entity in itself, which allows me to be other than what I can be when I dance. Even if there is ego, of course, there is also…like a retinal detachment”.
These words remind us that I am another (2012) is one of the first important pieces by Catherine Gaudet, who also signed more recently The pretty things (2022) and the magnificent The fading of the marvelous (2018). For these two pieces, as for the new parallel worldsAntoine Berthiaume is in the music, an essential part of this current, this basso continuo which allows performers to follow a flood of transformations.
“Yeah, but this current, sometimes it is interrupted, huh”, modulates Louise Bédard. “Even when it stops, we know there is another current below,” adds Sarah Williams. “Oh no, sometimes, from inside, I don’t feel it anymore, and I stay hanging on the edge of the cliff and I look down to see where I have to dive again, to find this current, and I like that parts that do that; it creates beautiful landscapes. »
“The material is there, concludes Mr.me Bedard. It brings us together, this material, this amalgamation of several components that Catherine [Gaudet] has the gift of handling, and which means that we are always on an evolving terrain. » In constant exploration; with a certain haunting idea of finitude; navigate parallel worlds.