This danse is definitely macabre
Montrealers walk out during show
MONTREAL • In retrospect, the earplugs handed out to audience members arriving at last week’s dance premiere should have been a sign.
Not to mention the message from choreographer Dave St- Pierre distributed with the program declaring, “You have to vomit art. You have to f---ing VOMIT it!!!!!!”
But after the performance of Suie (Soot) got underway at Montreal’s high- brow Place des Arts, many in the audience were dumbfounded as ear-splitting machine noise took the place of music, a dog barked at the dancers and a character with his hand stuck in a Pepsi machine repeated ad nauseam, “My hand is stuck in the vending machine.”
Critics present said many people walked out during Wednesday’s premiere and, last Friday, the promoter took the rare step of inviting subscribers to change their tickets for another show.
Citing t he “numerous negative c omments” it had received since opening night, the contemporary dance promoter Danse Danse warned ticket- holders in an email that they could be in for a surprise.
The message quoted from St-Pierre’s artistic statement about vomiting art: “Suie is my breaking point. Suie is your tinnitus. Suie is our implosion.
“Suie is an incomplete combustion,” he wrote.
In nearly 20 years of existence, Danse Danse had never encountered such a negative response to one of its shows.
“After the premiere, we had an enormous number of calls from subscribers who were disappointed,” programming director Caroline Ohrt said.
“They were not outraged or shocked.
“They felt like they had been swindled.”
She said the show’s creators, St- Pierre and dancer Anne Le Beau, were given carte blanche, and the first time Ohrt saw the show was the night of the premiere.
The description given last year to the roughly 1,000 subscribers who chose Suie in their package did not correspond at all to what was presented on stage, she said. As of Monday, about onequarter of subscribers had asked to change their tickets.
St- Pierre has a reputation as the enfant terrible of Quebec contemporary dance.
But his previous product i ons were critically acclaimed in the province and in Europe.
Writing in La Presse last week after seeing Suie, dance critic Luc Boulanger addressed his words to StPierre.
“Nobody l i kes bei ng vomited on ( to use your term) for 95 minutes,” Boulanger wrote.
“As the killjoy of contemporary dance, this is not the first time you have given the finger to the audience. But this time, I’m not sure everyone will come back for more.”
Other critics have been more sympathetic, even while acknowledging the aggressive nature of the performance.
“Where is t he dance? Where is the music? Where is the beauty of human bodi es? These are questions that could gnaw at many people,” Christian SaintPierre wrote in the theatre magazine Jeu.
“Let’s repeat: if the experience is at times painful, it is not, for all that, a gratuitous provocation.
“Let’s give a little more credit to an artist who for nearly 15 years has been taking an approach that is authentic and celebrated internationally.”
The choreographer could not be reached for comment, but he vented his anger at Danse Danse on Facebook.
“You prove that you are protecting the audience, you treat them like children, that you are not at all sensitive to art, that you level art, you turn it beige.… In the end, you show contempt for the audience as much as the artists,” St- Pierre wrote last Friday.
“They are not idiots. They are human.
“They can love it, hate it, yell that it was the worst piece of crap.”
Ohrt said that with the exchange of tickets, those who choose to attend will be more engaged in the performance.
“There are people who do not want to be there … and it is not our philosophy to force them,” she said.
Suie’s final performances are Wednesday through Saturday this week, in the Cinquième Salle of Place des Arts.
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME YOU HAVE GIVEN THE FINGER TO THE AUDIENCE.