“I love details. And I like to change and evolve despite the inside battles it creates sometimes.”
Louise Lecavalier is an Order of Canada Member and recipient of a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. The dancer and choreographer worked with Édouard Lock and La La La Human Steps from 1981 to 1999 and has collaborated with David Bowie and Frank Zappa, opening her appeal to a whole new generation. In 2006, she founded her contemporary dance company, Fou glorieux.
For the first time in her impressive career, Lecavalier will perform a solo work of her own choreography, and perhaps her most personal yet. Stations, which originally premiered in February 2020 in Düsseldorf has been hailed as “intoxicating” and a “kinetic marvel.” The 60-minute work is separated into four stages, delineated by four moveable columns of light – which can be interpreted as seasons of life. The lighting design is by Alain Lortie. The score is provided by four groups, one for each station, with each section escalating in musical intensity: guitarist Antoine Berthiaume, saxophonist Colin Stetson, electronic group Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart, and singers Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld. Stations is a potent work about freedom and Lecavalier’s body defies limitations. It encapsulates an artist of worldly experience and expression, with each minute movement intensely loaded with nuance and intention.
Harbourfront Centre presents the Toronto premiere November 23–25, 2023 at 7:30pm at Fleck Dance Theatre as part of its international contemporary dance series, Torque. To purchase tickets please visit HarbourfrontCentre.com.
Here is my interview with Louise. Want to know more? Louise will participate in a post-show Q&A on November 24.
Stations originally premiered in early 2020 and is a work about freedom. A lot has changed since then. Has the performance changed?
Some type of freedom is inside us, that is the thing one I know, and the events of the world do not change this. For the performance I could answer that it didn’t change a lot, but there are details and timings that have been changed or have evolved gradually. Some friends and audience members have seen it a few times, and after the recent shows in Québec and Montreal, many told me that the piece seemed very different, they thought that I had modified it a lot. But it isn't the case. In a way I like to hear this, because it may mean that everything is in the details, and that the audience sees the details. I love details. And I like to change and evolve despite the inside battles it creates sometimes.
Although I felt totally at the right place when the piece opened 3 years ago, I think that I grew with it or that Stations grew with me. In harmony and with continuous work.
This performance has been described as a “personal performance.” What does that mean for you? What does that mean for audiences?
It is hard to avoid being close to yourself in a solo. It is an opportunity if not an obligation to connect to what is important to you. This dance originated in the reading of a masterpiece of mystical literature, written by Marguerite Porete, a 13th century beguine du Libre Esprit. She got burned for bringing spiritual ideas that were totally avant-gardist and unacceptable for her time. I started my movement research for Stations under her influence and tried to find the simplest dance I could, that would be at the same time interior and trying to open the space. I thought I was in my home, a home with no walls and no roof, an unlimited place where I could let the audience come in. That is the first Station, coming into the interior world of someone.
In all the stations of the piece, I am interacting with other artists universes: musicians and composers Antoine Berthiaume, Colin Stetson, Suuns and Jerusalem of my Heart, Blixa Bargeld and Teho Teardo and the lighting designer Alain Lortie. So, the piece is personal but not only that.
How did you choose the groups that provide the score?
Most choices impose themselves. Patrick Lamothe, a friend and dancer I worked with and a music lover, brings me lots of different tracks of musics. This time I mentioned I was looking into jazz and two music instruments, saxophone and trumpet. That is how he made me discover the music of Colin Stetson. I loved it so much that I thought I could make a whole show on his music. But it was not so easy to create on this dominating music; I improvised on it day after day and nearly exhausted myself without finding a clear choreographic avenue. So I started to work with other type of musics that were less intense and after a few months I went back to Stetson’s pieces. Having developed more dance vocabulary, I was able to dialogue with it. There are two musics from him in the show.
Playing music at random in the studio I found a track made by Suuns and Jerusalem of my heart, I loved improvising on it, I made it loop and loop and found more and more dance material.
There were also musics that I worked with for a long time before I abandoned them. One got replaced by the song Nerissimo from Blixa Bargeld and Teho Teardo, un coup de foudre, and the other one got replaced by a creation from Antoine Berthiaume who made the score for Battleground my previous show. He crafted the music of the first station on place, going back and forth between dance rehearsals to his own studio. He did also all the arrangements of the piece, it gives a unity to the whole score.
What do you want people to take away from experiencing your performance?
This question comes often, and I am really stuck with no definitive answer to that. I do not know what I want people to get from a show. They can take it the way they want, so it can be very different from one person to another. It is dance. If I would have a very specific message to pass, I would write it rather than dance it. I do not create a dance with a story in mind, neither with a precise goal. I do not want people to be impressed, or in awe or anything of that type. I simply want to share an experience, of some of questions and answers, joys and battles. Maybe others can recognize themselves in this more or less.
Interview by Glodeane Brown
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