NO DISCIPLINE PROBLEMS AT OFFTA
Artistic dance in Montreal has never had a home like this
The Monument-National on St-Laurent Blvd. is no stranger to change, having undergone several transformations during its 113-year history — from housing the St. Jean Baptiste Society and showing Yiddish theatre to welcoming cabaret stars like Edith Piaf. Now the venerable institution has added a new feather to its performing arts cap: La Serre, arts vivants. This group now in residence at the Monument-National helps local emerging dance and theatre artists to create and show their work. Some of those emerging artists get featured in the annual showcase produced by La Serre called OFFTA, whose 10th edition runs May 30 to June 8.
Although it began in the shadow of the Festival TransAmériques (FTA), OFFTA has since established itself as a full-fledged summer arts event unfolding both indoors at the Monument-National, Théâtre d’aujourd’hui and other downtown venues, and at free happenings in outdoor squares and parks.
This year, the OFFTA artistic committee considered 166 applications for 20 or so spots on the program. Dance applications were vetted by two dance representatives on the committee, Marie-Josée Beaubien of Agora de la Danse, and dancer-choreographer Marie-Claire Forté. Emerging artists
applied as well as established performers like Clara Furey, who is appearing in two different shows, and dancer-actor-jokester Marc Béland, who seems to pop up anywhere there’s a stage.
“OFFTA presents dance, theatre and performance — above all in hybrid forms that thumb their noses at artistic disciplines,” declared Jasmine Catudal, OFFTA co-director with Vincent de Repentigny, in announcing the festival program to a youthful, hyped-up crowd gathered at the Monument-National.
Categorizing OFFTA shows as “dance” or “theatre” is therefore rather risky business and in the end, not particularly useful. Choreography and Clara Furey’s voice meld, for example, in Daina Ashbee’s Pour, a reflection on a topic usually relegated to medical journals and women’s magazines — menstruation.
Furey also performs in Untied Tales, an hour-long work ostensibly about existential anxiety that she and Slovakia-born Peter Jasko created and first presented last year at La Chapelle. The work shares their apparent taste for overwrought movement.
Another male-female tandem, Ruminant ruminant by the imaginatively intelligent choreographer Brice Noeser, has him and Karina Iraola gesticulating to Serge Gainsbourg’s Ne Dis Rien, among other lyrical
tunes. The work, first seen at the Monument-National in 2014, will be presented during OFFTA at Théâtre aux Écuries.
Caroline St-Laurent, who won notice for her work at the 2012 Edgy Women Festival, last year created Relais Papillon, a test for three female swimmers (Ophélie Coughlan, Stéphanie StLaurent and Geneviève Hudon), a contemporary dancer (Ariane Paradis) and a former ballerina with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, (Émilie Durville). While suspended in a special harness, each in turn tries to reproduce the movements in the air that they usually use in water or on the ground. Call it a cross-disciplinary exercise.
Multi-disciplinary artist Amelia Ehrhardt has served as curator at Toronto’s Dancemakers creation centre since late last year. At OFFTA, she’ll present a work for five dancers with the long-winded title: Traditional Dance or this dance is in commemoration of the 103rd anniversary of the rite of spring. Each year, the title changes the anniversary number. Thus, last year was the 102nd anniversary of Stravinsky’s 1913 masterpiece, Rite of Spring. The Rite does not even figure in Ehrhardt’s work, which uses music by Arthur Russell, Carl Nielsen and others.
Calling themselves Collectif La tresse, three women — Geneviève Boulet, Erin O’Loughlin and Laura Toma — created Beauté brute in which they ritually examine feminine fantasies and other forms of feminine expression. As
the title suggests, some forms are symbolically brutal.
This year, OFFTA is drawing attention to indigenous people’s creations, most notably in Tsekan, a fantasy drama by Émilie Monnet about a spaceship that lands on Earth to remind us about the need to treat our environment with respect. Monnet and Waawaate Fobister perform to music by Cris Derksen and Geronimo Inutiq.
The arrival of La Serre and OFFTA to the Monument National has brought changes to the building’s fourth, fifth and sixth floors, where the general public never sets foot. Henceforth, artists and performers will be able to use two new rehearsal rooms, and relax and chat in a stylish lounge with windows overlooking St-Laurent and the small park opposite. No longer will the Monument National serve only as a stage for dance companies and for productions by students of the National Theatre School, which owns the building. The Monument National has become a creation centre, too.
On a brief tour of the upper floors, Catudal expressed a hope that eventually the Monument-National roof could be transformed into a public terrace.
With the Monument-National expanding its creative role and the Espace Danse studios in the Wilder Building slated to open next year, Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles is acquiring a vibrancy with exciting artistic potential. Dance in Montreal has never before been so well housed.