2200 Ft / Student: 1700 Ft / Trafó Season Ticket is valid!
After the March 20th performance Katalin Lőrinc dancer, dance-critic will talk to choreographer Ginette Laurin and members of the company. Everybody is welcome!
In La Chambre blanche (White Room), performers are enclosed in a strange white room that evokes the intimacy of a bedroom, the starkness of a mental hospital, and the isolation of a fortress.
One by one these sites materialize to set the stage of the emotions they evoke. The dance blends into a series of images depicting the itinerary of several interwining destinies. In the enclosed space, the narrowness of the milk-white walls brings on disequilibrium, fainting spells, and vertigo. It is a place which bonds the beings confined within its walls in proximity, in promiscuity. Sometimes their movements become imperceptible, leaving only tired bodies, focused on the act of breathing. Then suddenly, they start to move, they struggle, resisting reason to feed upon their dreams : sole possible escape towards the sublime, a fleeting sensation of the bodies.
„The dance blends into a series of images depicting the itinerary of several destinies which intertwine in this too-constricted space. But although the occupants of this room infused with so much darkness should be black and taciturn in its likeness, they fill themselves to the brim with a wild emotional passion which makes them lighter than the very air. So, in one brief flash, through these bodies distorted by spacial density, we seem to perceive dazzling beings who burst out in almost angelic laughter. Fade out. La Chambre Blanche is like a prayer in search of the ultimate through expressed tensions.” /Ginette Laurin, March 1992/
2008 Revival: Created in 1992 and opening Montreal’s 5th Festival international de nouvelle danse, La Chambre Blanche is one of Ginette Laurin’s most important works. The piece - an exploration of theatricality and emotion - has toured extensively in Europe, North America, Israel and Asia. It won the 1992 Grand Prix of the Conseil des arts de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal and the Dora Mavor Moore Award in Toronto. In continuity with her latest work étude #3 pour cordes et poulies where the choreographer explores the theme of constraint and confinement, she is now proposing a new take on La Chambre Blanche. Nine dancers - six women and three men including one from the original cast - occupy the 1992 set. Costumes and lights remain the same. The dance on pointe and the play on unsteadiness that characterised the piece are still very present. However, some choreographic sections have been updated and a new musical composition revives the work.
"…a disturbingly violent work tempered, and in some instances highlighted, by moments of real tenderness and sublime elegance." The Scotsman, Glasgow, 1993
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Choreography: Ginette Laurin
Dancers:
Rémi Laurin-Ouellette, Brianna Lombardo, Marie-Ève Nadeau, Robert Meilleur, Michelle Rhode, Gillian Seaward, Neil Sochasky, Audrey Thibodeau, Wen-Shuan Yang
Rehearsal Master: John Ottmann
Lighting Designer: Martin Labrecque
Original Music: Nicolas Bernier, Jacques Poulin-Denis
Costumes Designer: Jean-Yves Cadieux
Set Design: Stéphane Roy
Technical Director: André Houle
Wardrobe Assistant: Nicole Langlois
Coproducer: Place des Arts (Montreal, Canada)
Supported by:
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts de Montréal, Foreign Affairs Canada, Canadian Heritage, Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec, Emploi-Québec.
