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flesh and sound

Vías’ Flesh and Sound challenges how live art engages the audience. This two-part performance begins with an interactive installation in the gallery conceived by Siam Obregón, aimed at fostering a sense of attentiveness and contemplation in the viewer before transitioning into the performance in the theatre. This installation provides a unique opportunity for spectators to delve into the sounds that will later envelop them in the performance, offering a space for exploration, discovery, and reflection.

Following the installation, the theatre performance by Paco Ziel and Bernardo Alvarado Rojas features a rotating cast, ensuring a different perspective each night. Utilizing a 360-degree sound design, the performers elicit movement through reactions, disruptions, and amplifications. The choreography and sonic composition are intricately intertwined, drawing inspiration from creatures rooted in Mexican pre-Hispanic cosmology, bridging the past with the present. By integrating the study of pre-Hispanic instruments with contemporary technology and incorporating kinetic and acoustic vibrations from the human body, this performance invites the audience to break away from Western conventions of sound analysis, perception, and emotional resonance, posing a fundamental question: “How do you listen?”

The Flesh and Sound installation in the MAI gallery will be open to the public from 12pm to 6pm, from Wednesday November 8th to Saturday November 11th, 2023.

Rotating performers :

Nov 8th → Paco Ziel + Bernardo Alvarado Rojas
Nov 9th → Rachelle Bourget + Bernardo Alvarado Rojas
Nov 10th → Isabel Cruz + Rachelle Bourget
Nov 11th → Isabel Cruz + Paco Ziel

credits

Co-creators: Siam Obregón, Bernardo Alvarado Rojas, Paco Ziel.

Performers: Rachelle Bourget, Isabel Cruz , Bernardo Alvarado Rojas, Paco Ziel

Artistic advisor: Ami Shulman

External eye: Diana León

Visual direction, art installation design and set design: Siam Obregón

Sound Design: Eric Saucke-Lacelle

Technical Director: Benoit Lariviere

Lighting Designer: Benoit Larivière

Costume Design: Camille Thibault-Bédard

Official photo: Damian Siqueiros

Partners: MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), Àgora de la Danse, Danse à la Carte, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Conseil des Arts de Montréal, Vidéographe, Maison de la Culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, École Supérieure de Ballet du Québec, Consulado General de México en Montreal, Espacio México.

Creative team biographies

Paco Ziel, Co-Creator and Performer
Born in Mexico City, Paco began his career in classical dance at the École Supérieure de Ballet du Québec. Alongside his studies, Paco developed an interest in deep body awareness, leading him to discover different ways of training such as the Rubberband method, Gaga, Yoga , Feldenkrais and meditation. Since 2015, he has been a dancer with RUBBERBAND, under the direction of Victor Quijada, and has toured with the company in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Germany and Poland. In 2014, he founded the multidisciplinary laboratory Quantum Collective, presented twice by Tangente in Montreal. Paco has worked with other Montreal artists and companies such as PPS Danse, Anne Plamondon Productions, Martin Messier, Je suis Julio and independent choreographers. He has been a guest teacher at Springboard Danse Montréal, Domaine Forget, Transformation, l’École de Danse de Québec, l’École Supérieure de Ballet du Québec and Danse à la Carte. He is a self-taught filmmaker, photographer and electronic music composer who focuses primarily on the human body, movement and natural landscapes. Since 2019 Paco has been co-director of Vías alongside Diana León, for which he participated in the creation of the works Sur ce chemin, tu es sûr de te perdre, Sabor de mi corazón and Flesh and Sound.

Bernardo Alvarado, Co-Creator and Performer
Bernardo Alvarado Rojas is a music producer, composer and sound designer interested in finding ways to provoke vitality, self awareness and an enhanced perception of our relationship to our planet Earth and its habitants via his artwork. He makes use of a blend of ancestral and modern acoustic instruments, sound recording, and electronic instrumentation to create music and sound that attempts to explore the depths of our humanity.

Bernardo was born and raised in Mexico City. At age 19 he started his formal training as a producer, classical composer, pianist and guitarist at Concordia University. After graduating with honors in 2015, he started producing and collaborating with other artists to create electronic, traditional and classical music as KALMO. He also started offering professional music composition, sound design and sound post-production services to music supervisors, video editors, film directors, video production companies and dance choreographers with his label VibroSounds.

Siam Obregón, Visual direction, art installation design and set design
Siam Obregón is a Mexican independent filmmaker, visual artist, and curator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She graduated with honors from Concordia University, earning her BFA degree with a specialization in Film Production.

With a diverse artistic background in dance, theater, and photography, she is driven to experiment with various mediums. Her focus centers on observation, intimacy, and themes of cultural identity. Her latest works have been featured in multiple festivals, including HotDocs, Festival International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA), REGARD, and the Rhode Island Film Fest.

Isabel Cruz, Performer
Isabel Cruz graduated from l’École Supérieure de Ballet du Québec in 2022. She is now working with Margie Gillis as part of the Legacy Project. Her creative background has evolved through the years, including dance and music performance. Isabel is also interested and enjoys playing with music, choreography, design, painting, and photography, all of which she does for her own pleasure but as well as to serve her community. Isabel aims to reach a profound knowledge of dance’s breathtaking language in order to convey her feelings, ideas, and emotions through the practice, and consequently reach a level of communion both with herself and as a consequence with
the audience.

Rachelle Bourget, Performer
Based in Montreal, Rachelle Bourget is a contemporary dance artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba. A graduate of The School of Contemporary Dancers, she has worked with numerous choreographers, including Daina Ashbee, ENTITEY/jason martin, VIVUS – James Viveiros, Danse K par K, Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, @tendance/C.Medina, Pablo Bronstein, and in works by Ming Hon and Riley Sims.

She was a founding member of Nova Dance Collective, a Winnipeg-based contemporary dance collective, between 2011 and 2016. She later focused on developing her artistic practice through the creation of solo works, mainly AFTER THE CAUSE, which was presented in Winnipeg at the Rachel Browne Theatre (2019), and in Montreal at Tangente Danse (2021) and Festival OFFTA (2022).

graveyards and gardens

Graveyards and Gardens – a collaborative performance installation created and performed by composer Caroline Shaw and choreographer Vanessa Goodman – displays the beauty of how the body remembers, while interrogating the intimacy between our surroundings and the body. This immersive theatrical work examines memory as a process of reconstruction rather than as an exact recall of fixed events. By embracing the various elaborations, distortions, and omissions of embodied memory, the artists create generative performance systems; a “living album” that continues to fold and unfold into itself.

The October 27th performance will be followed by a talkback with the artists hosted by Andrea Peña.

Trigger warning: mild strobing

credits

Co-creators/Interpreters/Set Design: Vanessa Goodman / Caroline Shaw
Costume Design: Vanessa Goodman
Artistic Producer: Hilary Maxwell
Sound Design: Kate De Lorme/Eric Chad
Technical Director and Lighting Designer: James Proudfoot
Video: David Cooper
Tour Agent: Brent Belsher

biographies

Vanessa Goodman respectfully acknowledges that she lives, works and creates on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. She holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University and is the artistic director of Action at a Distance Dance Society. Vanessa is attracted to art that has a weight and meaning beyond the purely aesthetic and uses her choreography as an opportunity to explore the human condition. Her choreographic practice is driven by weaving generative movement and audio into performative environments. Her work creates a sense of intimacy between our surroundings and the body. She has received several awards and honours, including The Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award (2013); The Yulanda M. Faris Scholarship (2017/18); The Chrystal Dance Prize (2019); The Schultz Endowment from Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2019); and the “Space to Fail” program (2019/20) in New Zealand, Australia and Vancouver. Her work has toured Canada, The United States, Europe and South America. Recent collaborations include works with Loscil, Graveyards and Gardens with Caroline Shaw and BLOT with Simona Deaconsecu. www.actionatadistance.ca

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Caroline is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. This year’s projects include the score to “Fleishman is in Trouble” (FX/Hulu), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), the score to Josephine Decker’s “The Sky Is Everywhere” (A24/Apple), music for the National Theatre’s production of “The Crucible” (dir. Lyndsey Turner), Justin Peck’s “Partita” with NY City Ballet, a new stage work “LIFE” (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust), the premiere of “Microfictions Vol. 3” for NY Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth, a live orchestral score for Wu Tsang’s silent film “Moby Dick” co-composed with Andrew Yee, two albums on Nonesuch (“Evergreen” and “The Blue Hour”), the score for Helen Simoneau’s dance work “Delicate Power”, tours of Graveyards & Gardens (co-created immersive theatrical work with Vanessa Goodman), and tours with So Percussion featuring songs from “Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part” (Nonesuch), amid occasional chamber music appearances as violist (Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, La Jolla Music Society). Caroline has written over 100 works in the last decade, for Anne Sofie von Otter, Davóne Tines, Yo Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, LA Phil, Philharmonia Baroque, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Aizuri Quartet, The Crossing, Dover Quartet, Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Miro Quartet, I Giardini, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Ariadne Greif, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Britt Festival, and the Vail Dance Festival. She has contributed production to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid, and Nas. Her work as vocalist or composer has appeared in several films, tv series, and podcasts including The Humans, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, Beyonce’s Homecoming, Tár, Dolly Parton’s America, and More Perfect. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

À perte de vue - intégrale

Welcoming the broken
Welcoming the unbroken
Of what, in the meantime, will live on
Of what, when glimpsed, fades away
Is it living to welcome
Is it the other who arrives, already
François Cheng [ Translated from French ]*

À perte de vue is a diptych of duets featuring Marie-Hélène Bellavance and performers Isabelle Poirier and Georges-Nicolas Tremblay, set to music by Montreal-based composer Robert Normandeau. The first duet evokes the sustenance of what is lost as an entity with an existence of its own. Accompanied by dancer George-Nicolas Tremblay, who abstractly personifies the concept of brokenness, a woman gradually discovers herself through dance and asserts her freedom. In the flow of tamed movement, her partner embodies the external force that propels her towards a change of reality.

The second duet featuring Marie-Hélène and Isabelle, exposes the confrontation between what is lost forever and the acceptance of a new reality. Body to body, soul to soul, the two dancers face each other, double over, lean on one another and imitate each other in the elaboration and execution of movements and dance. Lucie Grégoire stages a mirror dynamic between two women, one a reflection of the other, perhaps her double, soul mates with rediscovered inner strength. A vibrantly human encounter that transcends alterity through dance, an intense reflection on resilience, singularity and transformation.

credits

Choreography, in collaboration with the interpreters: Lucie Grégoire
Interpreters : Marie-Hélène Bellavance, Isabelle Poirier, Georges-Nicolas Tremblay
Music : Robert Normandeau
Lighting : Pierre Lavoie
Dramaturg: Paulo Castro-Lopes
Costumes Design : Marilène Bastien
Rehearsals : Dodik Gédouin
Technical Director : Judith Allen
Communications : Laurie Perron

A Lucie Grégoire Danse and Corpuscule Danse production

*François Cheng, Le livre du vide médian, Albin Michel, Paris, 2005

switch (meditations on crying) + poetics to activate the technology of the body + nurse tree

Drawing from strip tease, lap dance, meditation and intuitive martial arts – Switch (meditations on crying) wrestles with socialized notions of sexiness and the buddhist concept of the hungry ghost. The hungry ghost in eastern philosophy represents the insatiable hunger alive in people that leads to addiction, self harm or harm to others. Switch (meditations on crying) is a dance solo that embodies the fluid and creaturely aspects of personhood, calling upon sensation to disrupt objectification.

Poetics to Activate the Technology of the Body is a dance video series inspired by guided meditations and the “how to” approach of a work-out video. The goal orientation of these dance videos is a monument to catching one’s breath, calming the nervous system, and a digital spa where participants are guided back into self and into sensation- through sound and dance.

Nurse Tree is an installation of body workers and the aesthetics and practices of care – that seeks to move beyond critique of the medical industrial complex to a place where alternative economies of care exist. Wrestling with the need for another vision for future while acknowledging the harms of utopic thinking. It is a proposition for another way of living, dying and caring for eachother along the way.

Free childcare will be offered during the performance on May 6th 2023. Register here.

Credits:

Be Heintzman Hope — Artistic direction, choreography, performance Switch (meditations on crying), sound weaver | Lucy B., Kaiden Diaz, Bam Truong — Performance Nurse Tree | Baco Lepage-Acosta — Conception video Poetics to Active the Technology of the Body | Nien Tzu Weng — Lighting fairy | Alice Lepage-Acosta — Costumes | Sasha Lang, Tomas Furey — Sound guides | Carmen Colas — Support to sound weaver | Néné Myriam-Konaté, Clara Furey, Baco Lepage-Acosta, Nada Khashaba, Dhalia Li, Maxine Segalowitz, K.G. Guttman, Carol Prieur — Dramaturgy | Malek Robanna — Astrological consult | Kinga Michalska, Baco Lepage-Acosta — Promotional images, video

Partners and supports for creation — CCOV, Studio 303

The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of: Conseil des arts du Canada, Conseil des arts de Montréal.

Co-presented with MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) and Danse-Cité.
A coproduction Be Heintzman Hope, MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels), Parbleux & Danse-Cité

je ne vais pas inonder la mer (cam + mai)

Je ne vais pas inonder la mer is a danced elegy that explores the role our relationship with mothers and our heritage play in the construction of femininity. This solo piece by Mexican choreographer and performer Sonia Bustos, draws from her personal history and search for identity, tinged with the pain of grieving her mother and grandmother. At the crossroads of questions on feminine condition, lineage, and memory, the artist explores the phenomena of reminiscence through theatrical dance, awakening all five senses. Food, music, and an evocation of social norms, beliefs and rituals inspire and inform this visceral creation.

Conseil des arts de Montréal and the MAI partner to offer a range of services to a choreographer (or a collective of choreographers) who encounters structural and systemic obstacles in their artistic practice based on their identities. This partnership provides artists with the means to question, test ideas and techniques, to collaborate and create through a well-supported process that is inclusive of time, space and administrative resources. In 2021, two in process-showing will take place.

Produced with the support from the Government of Québec and the City of Montréal
as part of l’Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and from the Canada
Council for the Arts

ephemeral artifacts (cancelled)

Ephemeral Artifacts uses tap dancing and storytelling to explore the histories of tap and jazz, and the connection of these intertwined genres to black bodies. Professional tap dancer Travis Knights draws us in with his signature style, both intimate and intricate, encouraging audiences to listen to the stories, and the bodies, that have been kept alive through dance and oral traditions. The lineage of tap is both a meditation and a metaphor; on rhythm, adaptability, improvisation, and resistance through racialized bodies.

Produced by Theatre Passe Muraille and Anandam Dancetheatre Productions

deux solitudes dans une même présence

Sometimes you have to leave home in order to understand your roots and fall back in love with what you’d seen too frequently to appreciate before. Deux solitudes dans une même présence explores the (re-)construction of identity through uprooting and the body in exile. The experience of migration intimately informs this duo piece by Venezuelan choreographer and dancer Ariana Pirela Sánchez, where the body, carrying its ancestral memories, is seen as a vehicle for desire, resistance and resilience. Embracing the form of a confessional narrative, the artist explores themes of forgetting, confabulation and rejection in the face of cultural assimilation in order to exhume her deepest memories.

Produced with the support from the Government of Québec and the City of Montréal
as part of l’Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and from the Canada
Council for the Arts

pomegranate (suspended indefinitely)

[highlight background=”#e2011e” color=”#ffffff”]— Montreal is in red zone since October 01, 2020. The activities of MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) are suspended until further notice. This performance is suspended indefinitely. See MAI’s latest updates related to COVID-19. — [/highlight]

Pomegranate is a solo by veteran Montreal dancer Heather Mah. The performance is an interpretation of her grandmother’s life, a fragmented journey told through stories of family and migration that begin in China in 1895. As a performer Heather has worked with some of Quebec’s most innovative dance companies: Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Lucie Grégoire Danse, and Le Carré des Lombes, to name but a few. In 2005, she obtained a B.A. with distinction (Psychology) and a certificate in coaching. Still a dancer today, she also works as an instructor and coach, employing wellness practices to promote health and balance in body and mind.

Heather Mah is a recipient of the 2018-2019 joint support in dance CAM+MAI.

Produced with the support from the Government of Québec and the City of Montréal
as part of l’Entente sur le développement culturel de Montréal, and from the Canada Council for the Arts

sur ce chemin tu es sûre de te perdre (webcast performance)

This multidisciplinary solo, somewhere between dance, theatre and music, is the fruit of three collaborations between Diana León and emerging creators Paco Ziel, Jeremy Galdeano and Vera Kvarcakova. Their guiding theme is knowledge of the self and the work necessary – amidst social pressures, inner demons and aspirations – to find one’s own voice. With compositions by Alejandro Loredo, Tom Jarvis and Diana León, Sur ce chemin, tu es sûre de te perdre is a powerful evocation of the pleasure in finding one’s own rhythm, in response to those who surround and inspire us. Originally from Mexico, Diana León is a performer and creator and, notably, a dancer for the Grands Ballets Canadiens.

white [ariane]

ARIANE is the daughter that Nancy (a South American woman) never had. Nancy wrote a diary for ARIANE while she was inside her womb without knowing that she would be a boy. 28 years after the birth, Nancy crossed over the Atlantic to reveal the existence of the diary to her son. ARIAH LESTER (Lester Arias) takes the words from his mother’s diary and creates songs out of them. A space of (in)betweenness: monstrosity / beauty, feminine / masculine, light / darkness, concert / theatre, opera / burlesque, ARIANE / LESTER / ARIAH.