WITH A TRACE choreography by Melanie Demers, Valerie Calam and Peggy Baker. Presented by DanceWorks and firstthingsfirst at the Enwave Theatre (231 Queens Quay West). Tonight (Thursday) to Saturday (September 19 to 21), 8 pm. $18.75-$37.50. 416-973-4000. See listing.
Montreal choreographer Melanie Demers is often pegged as a political artist.
A dancer with O Vertigo for eight years before starting her own company, Mayday, Demers makes sprawling, theatrical, dark-edged works that portray strange communities of struggling humanity.
But like any label, the political one can chafe.
“I wanted to break free of that but am discovering it’s impossible,” she tells me after wrapping a rehearsal for her newest work, WOULD.
“I’ve realized that art is political, that everything we do is political. Because we live in a place that is quite privileged, we tend to forget about it – we dwell on matters of abstraction and aesthetics and so on. But art is still a profound political choice.”
This week Demers premieres her new duet, performed by Kate Holden and Montreal’s Marc Boivin. Former Dancemakers company member Holden commissioned the work (as well as the score by Nova Scotia folktronica drummer Joshua Van Tassel), and Boivin has been Demers’s teacher and colleague for many years.
Both are strong technical performers capable of delivering Demers’s preferred “seamless” mix of improvised and set material, danced and spoken. Though the work is not necessarily about the relationship between them, Demers mentions that it’s inevitably part of the mix.
“You can’t really escape what is there,” she says, “a man and a woman on stage with issues. It’ll be interesting to see how people read it, because as much as we put energy into breaking away from the image of the couple, it remains. So I wonder if I emphasize these things or go against them.” Demers laughs. “We’re still trying to figure it out.”
As I watch a run-through of WOULD the next day, everything Demers has been saying about the way she works and the work she’s made becomes clear. There is no line between the improvisations and the rest of the material there are roller-coaster transitions between the lightness of humour and the darkness of intense physicality there is virtuosity in the way things are transformed and performed. In Boivin’s large physical presence and Holden’s gentle strength, Demers’s multi-layered choreographic balancing act holds its tension.
“I’ve been interested in dance not because of the shapes but because of what is between the shapes,” she tells me.
Notwithstanding what the audience might experience, WOULD eschews overt gender or global politics for something Demers describes as more intimate.
“The piece looks at what might be,” she says. “It’s not so much about the future but about the possibilities we have in life and the choices we make with them. It’s a piece about potentiality.”
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