The door opened west - Sarah Chase
With modesty and sensitivity, Marc Boivin performs an autobiographical solo that sheds light on the mysterious architecture of memory.
When I make a work, I am always asking, what makes the interior of this person a unique vantage point? How is this a specific story?
When Marc arrived on Vancouver island to create with me, I picked him up at the airport to drive him to the ferry to take us to the small island where I lived.
As we drove, he happened to speak about his childhood love of architecture.
We dove into creation and I was more and more struck by his vivid way of placing his pivotal experiences in a specific set of rooms, or architectural layout. It felt like I could see these spaces, and the light in the spaces, where the moments and shifts of fate had occurred in Marc’s life.
We had created some intricately danced patterns and gesture sequences that would repeat during the piece, and I was inspired to also incorporate specific light patterns into the storytelling.
With the masterful artistic collaboration of James Proudfoot and Antoine Bedard, lighting designer and sound designer, these patterns of spaces of light and environments of sound are able to weave and dance through the stories.
-Sarah Chase
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Choreography: Sarah Chase
Dancer: Marc Boivin
Sound design: Antoine Bédard
Lighting: James Proudfoot
The creation of this solo was made possible with the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Agora de la danse.
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Starting fall 2022, Art Circulation, a non-profit organization composed of contemporary dance companies and independent artists, will be representing the solo The door opened west, a choreography by Sarah Chase dedicated to Marc Boivin.
The door opened west will be presented in Montreal as part of the OFF-CINARS program, in Circuit-Est’s Studio C, at 1881 St-André, on November 9, 2022, at 2:30 p.m. (English version) and on November 11, 2022, at 12 p.m. (French version).
For more details, please contact Jamie Wright at Art Circulation: jamie@artcirculation.org.
https://artcirculation.org/en/company/marc-boivin/
photo credit : Sarah Chase
Moins au sujet de moi - Sarah-Ève Grant-Lefebvre
Inspired and interpreted by Marc Boivin
For the past ten years, creator and choreographer Sarah-Ève Grant has been working on a portrait series of artists from different fields, with a specific curiosity about the people behind the art. What happens when an artist teaches and devotes their life to dance? Sarah-Ève’s work Moins au sujet de moi turns to dancer and teacher Marc Boivin. Walking the line between truth and fiction, the choreographer uses documentary fiction to show a kind of behind the scenes, share secrets, and reveal the infinitely small.
Sarah-Ève Grant
Choreographer
Sarah-Ève Grant is a choreographer and dancer. In 2009, she received her bachelor’s in dance with a specialization in choreography from UQAM. She launched her professional career with Un jour, mon père m’a dit (2010), presented as an opening act for Dave Saint-Pierre. Usine C’s 3rd Floor residencies hosted her for Note à Moi-Même (2011). She presented Dans le cercle (2012) and Le Guillaume Lambert Show (2015) at Tangente, and then Série Portraits (Note à Moi-Même, Jérémi Roy est un Homme Libre and Le Guillaume Lambert Show) at the OFFTA in 2014. In 2017, Corpuscule Danse commissioned her for the project Quadriptyque. She is currently working on Moins au sujet de moi, her most recent portrait of the dance artist and teacher Marc Boivin.
Artistic intent
‘Everything began with an email I wrote to Marc Boivin. We had coffee and discussed my portrait project. I offered to begin the process by observing his dance technique classes. I watched approximately 30 of Marc’s classes over the course of a year, for a total of 60 hours. I experienced every moment in class with Marc as a genuinely pleasurable performance. During our first research period in the studio, we talked. It was my opportunity to learn about him, his teaching career, and his path. I asked a lot of questions, and his answers always inspired me. I recorded our conversations, watched him, asked for his opinion, listened. I gradually confirmed that my choreographic lens would consider his teaching practice. We became closer through the research process. Today, the work is a multiplicity of layers, and only a small fraction of them are perceptible to audiences. I still have my observations notes, the theories supporting Marc’s teaching, concepts around learning, terms, audio recordings, conversations, writings, definitions. I am grateful to you, dear audience, for witnessing us at this point in our process.’ — Sarah-Ève Grant
Practical Informations
Dates
Oct. 2022, 21 – 5 pm
Oct. 2022, 22 – 11 am + 8 pm
Oct. 2022, 23 – 3 pm
Nov. 2022, 18 – 5 pm
Nov. 2022, 19 – 11 am + 8 pm
Nov. 2022, 20 – 3 pm
Get to
Studio 303
372 Sainte-Catherine West – 3rd floor
Montréal, QC H3B 1A2
Box office
Danse-Cité : (514) 525-3595
https://danse-cite.org/en/billetterie
Rates
Regular : 28 $ | Discounted : 24 $
Accompanying person (for spectators with a disability) : 0 $
Accessibility
https://www.studio303.ca/en/physical-location/
Duration of the show
60 minutes
Team
Sarah-Ève Grant — Choreography
Marc Boivin — Performance
Bertil Schulrabe — Percussion
Martin Sirois — Lighting design
Annik Hamel — Rehearsals
Carmen Ruiz — Artists support
Clémence Lavigne — Production direction
Lee Anholt — Technical direction
Video — Jean Martin | Soundtrack — Bertil Schulrabe | Voice — Marc Boivin
Images — Jean Martin
Partners and supports for creation — OFFTA, La Serre Arts Vivants, Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique, Usine C
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of: Conseil des arts du Canada.
A presentation Danse-Cité
A coproduction Sarah-Ève Grant & Danse-Cité
When he’s not creating and rehearsing in the studio, dancer Marc Boivin spends a lot of time teaching dance. His role as a teacher is the focus of a new work by choreographer Sarah-Ève Grant, to be presented in fall 2022.
Process and timeline:
This work is part of a series of portraits of individuals and artists from different backgrounds. The series has been in the making for about 10 years. The portrait of Marc Boivin was started in 2016.
2016:
Sarah-Ève attended several of Marc’s classes as an observer (roughly 30 classes, for a total of 60 hours of observation).
Fall 2017:
First period of creation in the studio: extensive discussions between Marc and Sarah-Ève.
Winter 2017:
Period of creation with Marc, a group of 10 dancers and one musician. Essentially a dance class on stage.
Spring 2018:
Another creative session with same number of dancers—only this time, all the rules were thrown out the window! Marc was no longer the teacher, technique no longer mattered, and the students became performers.
Spring 2018 to Summer 2020:
Period of reflection.
Sarah-Ève: “I decided to focus only on Marc, as we had planned at the beginning. I had amassed a huge amount of information, which I needed to organize: observation notes, descriptions of Marc’s classes, learning concepts, terms, recordings, discussion notes and transcripts, texts, definitions.”
January 2021:
Back to the studio to finish Marc’s solo creation on the transmission of knowledge and the ways in which learning and performing shape the human experience.
photo credit : Sarah-Ève Grant-Lefebvre
La Nef - Cédric Delorme-Bouchard
Cédric Delorme-Bouchard teams up with BOP (Ballet-Opéra-Pantomime) to create an astonishing show of light, movement and sound based on the piano compositions of Olivier Messiaen, a leading figure in late 20th-century contemporary music. On a circular arena, four grand pianos surround a black space, an epicentre from which light and images animated by the frenetic musical score emerge. From this luminous altar, eight dancers join in the mysterious celebration, their movements embodying Messiaen’s ever-changing sacred rhythms.
The artists worked on this production at an Orford Music artist residency.
Repertoire Overview
Excerpts from Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen and Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus; new works by Sophie Dupuis and Alexis Raynault.
Artists
Over the years, BOP has developed large-scale multidisciplinary shows such as Le Vin herbé (2016) around classical and contemporary musical works, presenting them in unusual settings. In 2019, Le Vaisseau-cœur marked the start of a fruitful creative collaboration with Cédric Delorme-Bouchard. The work was performed by 30 singers, 4 dancers and a 30-musician orchestra.
Pianists: Samuel Blanchette-Gagnon, Isabelle David, Mehdi Ghazi, Gaspard Tanguay-Labrosse
Dancers: David Albert-Toth, Leslie Baker, Marc Boivin, Mélanie Chouinard, Jennyfer Desbiens, Myriam Foisy, Lucie Grégoire, Emmanuel Proulx
Practical Informations
Dates
July 2023, 13 – 4:30 pm
Get to
Gilles-Lefebvre Concert Hall
3165, CHEMIN DU PARC
ORFORD (QUÉBEC) J1X 7A2
Box office
Oxford Musique: 819 843-3981, poste 232
billetterie@orford.mu
Rates
Regular : 50 $
In person or by phone: $3 per ticket
No service fees for tickets purchased online
Taxes are not included.
Accessibility
Persons with reduced mobility are invited to contact the box office before their arrival so that Orford Musique can provide services adapted to their needs.
Duration of the show
70 minutes
Déclarations - Mélanie Demers
This is her dying breath
This is my heart in the morning
This is her laughter
This is her absence
This is the state of things to come
On a plane, shortly after learning that his mother has terminal cancer, world-renowned Canadian artist Jordan Tannahill frantically writes out hundreds of statements. These short sentences aim to capture the essence of a life, to encapsulate an existence that is slowly fading.
On stage, a compelling theatrical device comes to life while five actors perform movements set to each of the short statements. The movements change from one performance to another. Each evening the spontaneous, dynamic work is created anew.
Déclarations is a complex and fascinating ballet, choreographed by Mélanie Demers and performed by Vlad Alexis, Marc Boivin, Claudia Chillis-Rivard, Macha Limonchik, and Jacques Poulin-Denis.
Tickets
November 1 to 19, 2022
Mélanie Demers ©Julie Artacho
Jordan Tannahill ©Caio Sanfelice
Vlad Alexis ©Pascale Methot
Marc Boivin ©Michael Slobodian
Claudia Chillis Rivard ©Maxim Pare Fortin
Macha Limonchik ©Andreanne Gauthier
Jacques Poulin-Denis ©Hugo B. Lefort
Aquarium - Lesandra Dodson
During a series of residencies in Montréal in 2019, choreographer Lesandra Dodson, dancers Marc Boivin and Elise Vanderborght, and songwriter Christine Fellows inhabited a fantastical visual world where axolotls swim through dreamscapes, centipedes metamorphize into windshield wipers, and sighs become signs. With a pair of sharp scissors and an eye for the surreal, Winnipeg songwriter Christine Fellows generated a series of paper collages that became the key inspiration for both choreography and music. Aquarium contains creatures both real and imagined, longing for connection, transforming before our very eyes.
Marc Boivin
Dancer, improviser, teacher and choreographer Marc Boivin began his dance career at Le Groupe de la Place Royale in Ottawa under the directorship of Peter Boneham and in 1985 joined Ginette Laurin and her newly formed company O Vertigo Danse. Since 1991 he has worked as an independent dancer, performing among others for Louise Bédard, Mélanie Demers, Sylvain Émard, Jean-Pierre Perreault, Tedd Robinson and Catherine Tardif. Affiliated with L’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal since 1987, Boivin guest teaches and choreographs in schools and professional organizations across Canada. He has been president of the Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault since 2006, was president of Regroupement québécois de la danse (2010-2014), and a member of the Montreal Arts Council board (2005-2010). He is the recipient of the Canada Council’s Jacqueline-Lemieux prize (1999) and the Dora Mavor Moore award (2014) for interpretation, in Mélanie Demers’ WOULD, alongside Kate Holden.
Christine Fellows
Christine Fellows finds music in sounds we tend to take for granted: the voices of the people we love, the sounds of the spaces we move through as part of our daily lives. Although she identifies primarily as a songwriter and performer, her practice includes poetry, spoken word, paper collage, stop-motion video, sound design, and composition. Fellows is based in Winnipeg, Treaty One Territory, where she collaborates with artists from all disciplines to create and produce performance works and recordings. She first collaborated with Lesandra Dodson in Winnipeg in the mid-1990s, and has maintained a strong connection to and appreciation for contemporary dance—Lesandra’s extraordinary work in particular—throughout the years. She is thrilled to be collaborating with Elise and Marc for the first time.
Elise Vanderborght
Elise studied ballet in Belgium and Paris before moving to Montréal in 1997 to study at the École Supérieur de Danse du Québec. Between 1998-2005, she worked with numerous Montreal-based choreographers and companies, including: Marie Chouinard, Jean Grand-Maître, Lucie Grégoire, la Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, Montréal Danse, Deborah Dunn and Danièle Desnoyers. In 2005, Elise moved to Halifax where she worked with Lisa Phinney Langley, Ruth-Ellen Kroll Jackson, Mocean Dance, Verve Mwendo, and SINS Dance. Elise returned to Montréal in 2016 and is currently working with Daina Ashbee. Her eleven years in Nova Scotia fostered unbreakable Atlantic bonds and she revels in her interactions with the East Coast dance community. This is her first collaboration with Lesandra Dodson and she is very excited to premiere this work in St.John’s.
Lesandra Dodson
Lesandra Dodson is a former dancer from Vancouver, now based in Fredericton NB. Her experiences at Simon Fraser University, the Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers Professional Program, Le Groupe Dance Lab, WCD, Trip Dance Company, and performance work with various luminous Canadian choreographers galvanized her interest in symbiotic creation. As a choreographer, she draws inspiration from individual performers, working collaboratively to find different means and perspectives of approaching theatrical ideas and themes. Over 30 years, she has performed and created many works nationally and internationally. She counts herself lucky to have worked with an impressive array of remarkable artists, including long-time collaborator Christine Fellows.
Lesandra is the Program Director at the Fredericton Playhouse. She oversees six different education, residency, and outreach programs, and curates a multidisciplinary presenting series.
Throughout her cross-country career she has been committed to creating key initiatives and opportunities that support and mentor emerging artists.
Performers/collaborators: Marc Boivin, Elise Vanderborght
Director/choreographer: Lesandra Dodson
Music and sound design: Christine Fellows
Paper collages/stop motion animation: Christine Fellows
Video: Lesandra Dodson
Text excerpts: ‘Axolotl’ by Julio Cortazar; text voiceover Camille & Clara Caskey Vanderborght
Costume design: Lesandra Dodson and Christine Fellows
Lighting design: Brian Kenny
Stage Manager: TBD (same as NDW)
Funding acknowledgments to the Canada Council for the Arts, Winnipeg Arts Council
Thanks to Studio 303 for the residency, Montreal Arts Council studios, La Poele, Lucie Gregoire, and Circuit-Est
Special thanks to NDW, Calla Lachance, Santiago Guzmán, LSPU Hall crew, and our families.
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La vie attend - Parts+Labour_danse
La vie attend, a new creation from Parts+Labour_danse
A Danse-Cité production in collaboration with Parts+Labour_Danse at Theâtre La Chapelle
September 27 to 30 and October 4 to 7, 2017 – 8 PM
Jeudis-causeries : September 28th & October 5th after the show.
In LA VIE ATTEND, five performers face the audience, tackling a delicate balancing act. They are teammates, enemies, victors and mourners, instigators and witnesses. All of their visceral and vulnerable contradictions, their pride and their shame, their hope and their fear, are laid out on the stage. Life as a game waiting to be played.
A theatrical work born of an intuitive and intellectual inspiration, seducing on the surface, physical and deceptively playful, LA VIE ATTEND deftly manipulates the deep primal tendencies we often avoid. Creative duo Emily Gualtieri and David Albert-Toth, the co-founders of Parts+Labour_Danse, kick off our Traces-Chorégraphes series with an illusory work, performed by five dancers who will no doubt win you over. It’s anyone’s game.
Choreographers : David Albert-Toth, Emily Gualtieri
Dancer-collaborators : Joe Danny Aurélien, Marc Boivin, Simon-Xavier Lefebvre, Milan Panet-Gigon, Nicolas Patry
Texts : The dancer-collaborators
Music : David Drury
Costumes : Angela Rassenti
Lighting designer : Paul Chambers
Outside eyes : Mélanie Demers, Ginelle Chagnon, Étienne Lepage, Jamie Wright
Partners:
Danse-Cité www.danse-cite.org
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ)
Conseil des Arts du Canada / Canada Council for the Arts
Circuit-est centre chorégraphique
CCOV (Centre de création O Vertigo)
photo credit: Claudia Chan Tak
Animal Triste - MAYDAY
Humans like to believe they are at the center of the world. Yet they know dinosaurs, fallen empires and glaciations. They know their fate but believe in eternity. On a clear day, they may see themselves poor and perishable. The next day, free, glorious and triumphant.
In the great march of the world, humans are nothing more than sad little animals. But animals that console themselves in beauty and in desire for immortality. For this, men will invent religions, philosophies and civilizations. They will conquer, dominate, oppress. And procreate. They will make up stories and write History. But very rarely will they understand where they stand and never really escape their condition. And deep down, men are those animals of no significance who only aspire to more and better.
Animal Triste might be a freeze frame to try to understand the nature and posture of Man in all his humanity.
Direction and choreography: Mélanie Demers
On stage: Marc Boivin, James Gnam, Brianna Lombardo and Riley Sims / Rehearsal assistant: Anne-Marie Jourdenais / Original Lighting: Alexandre Pilon-Guay / Music: Jacques Poulin-Denis
http://maydaydanse.ca/presentation-animal-triste-en
photo credit: Mathieu Doyon
Une idée sinon vraie…
In Une idée sinon vraie… Marc Boivin wanted to distance himself from an overtly personal approach to creation and to open up his process to the influence of other art forms. The artist was inspired by the way in which theatre and music can pay homage to the past while maintaining their relevance today. At once a voyage into the heart of commedia dell’arte, this creation involves role-playing and a series of transformations that reveals, through music and dance the different facets and vulnerabilities of being a man in today’s world.
Based on music composed by Ana Sokolović, this new work features the choreographer and dancer Marc Boivin and the Quatuor Bozzini. The musical score in seven movements is a reflection of seven symbolic characters in a commedia dell’arte world. In a single body, Marc Boivin expresses a parallel narrative of these diverse personalities. Like a Russian stacking doll, he goes through them one after another to reach the essence of their sensitivity and their universal dimension in a family portrait that is surprising, to say the least. The audience is plunged into a cascade of sensations that gives rise to vertigo, an irrevocable attraction for the mysteries of the individual and a questioning of our freedom to be. With great attention to detail, Marc Boivin’s unsettling performance, supported by the four musicians onstage, delivers an accomplished exercise in style. Far from conventional codes of theatre, the piece confronts the idea (that if not true is at least plausible) of what we are, of our vulnerable, changing perception of reality. A demanding solo on the perishable truths we depend on, and our multiple personalities and their contradictions
«The piece you are about to see will not appear to be new….for many years, I have been me, you have been you, those were those and the others have been the others. And in another thousands of years, when willhave turned whatever big wheel, we will come back to me standing here, you seated there, I speak and you listen….And the lines that I speak to you, that were the lines of before, will still be the lines, and you will imagine that you have heard them before just as you now feel as though you have already heard them before. » – Angelo Beolco, 1535
photo credit: Michael Slobodian
I 13 (square)
The research that underlies the solo Impact is documented and represented in the piece I13 (square). A related project, whose duration is 13 minutes and 13 seconds, this work can be seen as a visual and danced prologue to the solo.
Following a commission from Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, Marc Boivin asked Jonathan Inksetter to create a media work, which refers to the title of the photograph Milk and Blood by American artist Andres Serrano, and exposes, in parallel, his own creation process. Images of the relations developed between artistic interlocutors in the rehearsal studio are projected on a white Plexiglas screen, while the artist dances and improvises his memory of the work, in the soundscape created by Diane Labrosse and recorded live in the studio. In this work, one sees the dancerʼs parents, the source of any biographical quest, accompanying him in his journey.
Choreography and interpretation > Marc Boivin
Visual environment and conceptual development > Jonathan Inksetter
Rehearsal mistress and artistic consultant > Sophie Corriveau
Music > Diane Labrosse
Costume > Marc Boivin + Jonathan Inksetter
Original ligthting > Yan Lee Chan
photo credit: Sandra Lynn Bélanger
Impact
In 2007, Marc Boivin was given carte blanche by Andrew de Lotbinière Harwood to develop an improvisation project for his company AH HA Productions. This process, which gave rise to the piece R.A.F.T. 70, was an epiphany for Boivin, allowing him to tap into the boundless creative potential surrounding him and providing the first glimmerings of what was to become his solo project Impact. With R.A.F.T. 70 he acquired a strong taste for the unpredictable, a state akin to the process of choreographic creation, and confirmed his fascination with others, with exchange and risk-taking. For improvisation to happen, it is essential to allow others to feed it, inhabit it, shape it freely. This experience was a paroxysm for Boivin, a revelation of what, in his view, the choreographic act and the scenic event should be. Those participating in a shared project are communicating vessels, transferring wisdom, information and energy to one another. This is the direction that the dancer wishes to take from now on in his work.
Accompanied by the same three collaborators as in R.A.F.T. 70, Boivin began to develop a solo, his first to be performed by himself. Uncertain as to which theme he wanted to address and faced with endless possibilities, he chose to base his work on a determined process rather than on a specific theme. Guided and nourished by his collaborators, he dove into abstraction, developing sequences and improvisations. The echoes of their voices resonate in his work and their experiences permeate it, bringing forth new visions, which take hold of the creator and have impact on his trajectory.
While Impact started out as an autobiographical tale, it quickly became an investigation of trajectories: the crossing pathways of beings who are in perpetual transformation and who receive the imprints of multiple influences. Working with abstraction and in steadfast collaboration with his artistic allies, Boivin realized that the themes emerging from his efforts were precisely those of exchange, transmission and the contribution of others.
Thus, Impact speaks of connections between people and of the magnitude of their influence on one another. To whom do we owe the person we become? How do other beings collide with our own existence and ultimately, what shapes our identity? One by one, humans participate in the world, leaving behind a signature, a trace that someone else will find and make his own. Their ripples collide and converge, embrace one another, morphing into new influences. Impact is also and above all a body onstage, the body of a dancer who has lived and embodied the contributions of many, and who has been attuned to their diverse voices. A body on and in which this symphony of influences is harmonized and divided.
The research that underlies this creation is also documented and represented in the piece I 13 (square). A related project, whose duration is 13 minutes and 13 seconds, this work can be seen as a visual and danced prologue to the solo Impact.
Go to the I 13 (square) section.
Choreography and interpretation > Marc Boivin
Visual environment and conceptual development > Jonathan Inksetter
Rehearsal mistress and artistic consultant > Sophie Corriveau
Music > Diane Labrosse
Costume > Marc Boivin + Jonathan Inksetter
Original ligthting > Yan Lee Chan
Impact is a coproduction of Series 8 :08 and the Dance department of the University of Calgary and Tangente. The choreographer wishes to thank l’Agora de la danse for the residency that led to to the creation of the solo.
This piece was made possible through the support of the Canada Arts Council and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
crédit photo : Sandra Lynn Bélanger