Maria Kefirova moves between image and identity
Having vacated its long-time studios on Cherrier St. last year, Tangente continues to offer avant-garde dance at other locales even as it awaits completion of new studios near Place des Arts. Other than a few stops at the Cinquième Salle and Usine C this past season, Tangente has virtually settled into the Monument National’s vault- ing, multi-functional Studio Hydro-québec. That’s where Tangente presents its annual bill of foreign choreographers next week called Bancs d’essai internationaux.
Four of the five choreographers on the bill do indeed come from outside Canada. Babacar Cissé is a French contemporary hip-hop dancemaker. Daniele Ninarello hails from Turin, Italy. Tanja Raman is based in Cardiff, Wales, while Arno Schuitemaker comes from Arnhem in the Netherlands.
The fifth choreographer, Maria Kefirova, was born in Bulgaria, but has lived in Montreal since the mid-’90s. She graduated from LADDMI, the Montreal contemporary dance school that has sent many a budding choreographer and dancer into the local dance scene. For the past two years, however, Kefirova enjoyed a stimulating artistic residence at dasarts ,a kind of theatre-arts incubator in an attractive two-storey building in central Amsterdam. Her first year, she was the only dancer among 10artists, directors and other theatre people, most of whom came from abroad (several were Bulgarians). Collaborations were encouraged but not compulsory.
Since returning to Montreal in February, Kefirova has remained buoyed by her European sojourn.
“When I was there, it was incredible. They provided so many resources. It was very intensive,” said Kefirova following a recent rehearsal of Corps. Relations, a solo she presented at Tangente in 2010 and that she’ll restage in a shortened version next week. “I created a lot. Two pieces are almost ready that I hope to show here.”
Working in Europe, said Kefirova, had a totally different feeling.
“There was more exchange there. Generally, the intellectual side was super stimulating.”
Alas, conditions in the Netherlands are no longer so plush. Arts funding in Europe has suffered in the past year, particularly in the Neth- erlands. Today, the conditions might not be so different from her situation in Montreal, where she must handle everything alone.
“There, I was in a bubble. Here, I have to do it all. The ideal would be to work and live here but keep in touch with people and places there.”
Kefirova obviously has affinities with European dance.
“I always start with some kind of idea or concept,” she confessed, which would put her in a large camp of the European avant-garde. “But the body is super important. So I put both (in this solo), I hope.”
During the 20-minute piece – cut from its original 35 minutes – Kefirova engages in a constant dialogue with a film of herself on a TV screen. Situations are created that invite the viewer’s eye to move quickly from live figure to image. The question arises – which of them best shows the “real” person?
“I think that we’re a little bit disconnected from what we really are because of the demands of images, which are outside. It’s not a problem, it’s just a fact. It creates a dichotomy with the way we feel. There’s this perceived image, and we’re always a little bit fixed by the outside gaze.”
In other words, how we think we look and feel is not always the way that others perceive us. These inside/ outside relations are at the centre of Kefirova’s artistic interest.
Kefirova was loath to cut many bits of the solo to conform to the program’s time frame. Pity then, poor Babacar Cissé, who was obliged to cut no less than 40 minutes out of his 60-minute solo, Syndrome de l’exilé.
“It’s an excerpt. Many things won’t be seen,” said Cissé in a recent telephone interview from his studios in France’s southwestern city of Cenon near Bordeaux, where he directs the dance company that he founded in 2006, Les Associés Crew.
Cissé was among those who added momentum to the hiphop wave that spread across France in the 1980s.
“Many thought it was a passing fad, but it’s made its way into the biggest theatres. There was a half-hour hip-hop TV show. Each show began by showing a new move. Many young people watched, took a piece of cardboard (for a dance floor) and tried imitating what they saw on TV. Hip-hop really exploded in France in the early-’90s when the first hip-hop shows were staged in theatres.”
Last month, Montreal saw French hip-hop at its most refined when choreographer Mourad Merzouki of Lyon’s Käfig company staged a splendid double-bill using Brazilian urban dancers (some of Cisse’s company dancers have performed with Käfig). Yet, can a dance form spawned in the streets and centred on improvisation survive as a choreographed stage show?
“Sure,” said Cissé. “It’s a way of presenting themes that you want to show on stage. It’s like putting words together in a sentence and asking the audience a question. You can do the same in dance. You can create more precisely, present an idea, argue more forcefully.”
His solo speaks partly of the exile and journey of his Senegalese parents, and about another form of exile, too.
“Others live in exile through alcohol and drugs. They create another world that’s fleeting.”
Cissé performs to music that he composed on a computer. Not hip-hop music, he said, but contemporary. In hip-hop artistry, that distinction is becoming increasingly less distinct.
Bancs d’essai internationaux, Thursday to Saturday, May 12 at 7:30 p.m. at the Monument National, 1182 St. Laurent Blvd. Tickets, $20, students and seniors, $16, under 12, $10. Call 514-871-2224.