Carte Blanche: From Norway to Montreal
Troupe to perform Israeli duo’s piece
S trike up another first for DanseDanse. Next week, this intrepid series introduces yet another exciting foreign company from off the beaten track to Montreal: Carte Blanche. The 15-member troupe is not, as its name might imply, from a francophone country, but from Norway. It’s not from Oslo, either, but from Bergen, a thriving port city of 400,000 set among the fiords of Norway’s west coast.
Carte Blanche will perform Corps de Walk, choreographed and designed by the Israeli husbandand-wife team of Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. Eyal is part of a wave of Israeli-trained choreographers — others include Barak Marshall and Hofesh Shechter — who have made international careers in the wake of their mentor, Ohad Naharin, Israel’s most celebrated choreographer and longtime head of the Batsheva Dance Company. Eyal served a year as the company’s associate director and, in 2007, was the company’s “in-house” choreographer when Batsheva performed her work, Bertolina, in Montreal.
The lasting impression of Bertolina was one of loud music, vigorous scurrying by the energetic ensemble and great earnestness.
“That was a long time ago,” mused Eyal, 42, in a recent telephone interview from Tel Aviv.
A long time? Well, artists can certainly undergo a caterpillarcocoon-butterfly metamorphosis in six years. Between 1901 and 1907, Picasso, for example, passed from his Blue Period to the Rose Period to analytical cubism.
Eyal has not redefined her choreography quite to that extent, but the look of Corps de Walk is nonetheless radically different from that of Bertolina. After Bertolina, Eyal entered what might be termed her “bodysuit” period. From Makarova Kabisa (2008) through Killer Pig (2009, made also for Carte Blanche), Bill (2010) and now Corps de Walk, the dancers have worn bodysuits that with each new piece seemed to get tighter and increasingly sheer. In such suits, the body’s lines appear unbroken from finger to toe, accentuating lines and curves in the enticing way that high heels or toe shoes extend the length of a woman’s legs.
In Corps de Walk, Eyal went so far as to dye the dancers’ hair a skin colour. Made up, the dancers’ bodies look like a uniform monolith. From a distance, they all resemble each other.
Finding the balance between tribal allegiance and individual personality seems to be a constant in Eyal’s work. How far should individuals be willing to relinquish their own personality to wear a common suit? To see a mass of North Korean marchers on parade, as uniform as grains of sand, is a disquieting sight.
Although her dancers in Corps de Walk are dressed alike, Eyal hoped that the one-size-fits-all look would force individuals to make greater efforts to distinguish themselves.
“I think it brings out something strong in (their) personalities. Because everybody looks the same, (but) they’re really different.”
One might fancifully interpret Corps de Walk as a metaphor for Israel, a nation of strong individual personalities — think of Israeli parliamentarians arguing in the Knesset — who by force of circumstance must pool their strengths if the country is to survive.
Eyal dismissed, however, any direct connection that her work might have to politics, saying only that “everything informs my work — we live in life. I just want people to connect with (the work). I want people to feel something. If I touch only one person, it’s great.”
Eyal’s own sense of tribal belonging could be one reason that in her younger days she loved nightclub dancing and raves where tight crowds moved to the same pulse yet no one was obligated to conform to set patterns.
“In a way, you can see it in her pieces,” remarked Behar in a telephone interview from the Tel Aviv nightclub where he was working as a DJ that night, electronic sounds popping in the background.
Corps de Walk was commissioned by Carte Blanche’s Danish-born art- istic director, Bruno Heyndrickx, who was impressed by Eyal’s early work from 2003, Love. As artistic director of a company that is 100-per-cent subsidized by three levels of government, Heyndrickx is in the enviable position of being able to commission a few new works each year and to think of expanding his troupe by two or three more dancers. Recently 600 dancers applied for jobs with the troupe and 180 made the trip to Bergen for the audition this month, including one woman from Vancouver.
“Twenty-four years ago, there was a (government) plan to make a contemporary dance company and the minister of culture thought it should be based in Bergen,” Heyndrickx said in a phone interview. “Bergen is a very cultural city with a big music scene and quite an avant-garde scene.”
Establishing Carte Blanche in Bergen was a matter of decentralization, he said, adding that Oslo, too, has an active contemporary dance scene.
“There are a lot of freelance groups. Norway supports its artists quite well.
“Freelance companies have quite sufficient longer-term funding for four, five years.”
Hark! Is that the sound of Canadian dancers and choreographers packing their bags?
Carte Blanche performs Corps
de Walk Thursday to March 2 at 8 p.m. at Théâtre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts. Tickets cost $34.85 to $62.34. Call 514-842-2112 or visit pda.qc.ca.