Nova Bhattacharya and Louis Laberge-Côté’s partnership avoids the fetishistic guise of “fusion dance”
Nova Bhattacharya and Louis Laberge-Côté’s partnership avoids the fetishistic guise of “fusion dance”
“I’m in a lavender bubble bath with Nova!” says Louis LabergeCôté in a rehearsal for Akshongay, a 2013 production performed, directed and choreographed by Laberge-Côté and Nova Bhattacharya. “Louis is dying and I’m taking his temperature,” says Bhattacharya. The two are rehearsing an intimate floor sequence from the third act. Amy Hampton, the rehearsal director, just posed a question around intention.
Still on the floor, Bhattacharya and Laberge-Côté face each other under a muted spotlight with their legs intertwined. They hastily grip each other’s arms as if discovering the other’s flesh in secret. Their responses to Hampton’s question become a motif for the sequence that embeds itself into future rehearsals as the “Lavender Fever Section.”
It is this quality of whimsy and trust that defines Laberge-Côté and Bhattacharya’s nineteen-year artistic partnership, a pairing that transcends artistic disciplines and deliberately avoids the fetishistic guise of “fusion dance” or “East meets West.”
Formally trained in modern and contemporary dance, Laberge-Côté is an alumnus of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre and a former member of its affiliated company Toronto Dance Theatre. Bhattacharya is a bharatanatyam dancer who was among the first students in Toronto to receive training from the Indian classical dance luminary Menaka Thakkar. LabergeCôté hails from Québec City; Bhattacharya was raised in Scarborough. Their point of connection can be traced to a spin.
In 2000, Bhattacharya performed her acclaimed solo Maskura as part of the now defunct Series 8:08 in Toronto; Laberge-Côté watched in the audience. She performed a spiral movement that remains seared in his memory. “It was very Graham-like,” he says. The magnetic connection between her eyes and hand gestures, and the characteristic of bharatanatyam, also struck Laberge-Côté as profoundly expressive.
A few months later, Bhattacharya witnessed Laberge-Côté during his second season with Toronto Dance Theatre in Severe Clear. His intensity and vigour stood out to Bhattacharya, and what began as a post-show conversation soon turned into a studio session and eventually four collaborative productions:
Yirri Birri Birds of the Yago Bago (2003), Lingua Franca (2006), Romeo and Juliet Before Parting (2006) and Akshongay (2013), which was nominated for four Dora Awards. Together, they have performed more than 200 times and have toured across the country.
The spirit of their collaboration lies in improvisational structures that bridge their movement vocabularies and personal histories. One such exercise is called “copy-copy,” a blend of mirroring and shadowing, where they replicate each other’s physicality in sequence. This exercise led to the formation of an entire section of their first collaboration, Yirri Birri Birds of the Yago Bago.
The reciprocity and compulsory attention rooted in improvisational practice serves as a shared language between their varied movement styles. Bhattacharya and Laberge-Côté have even invented their own exercises such as “first-third” that calls on Bhattacharya to strike two poses from the iconography of classical Indian dance and for Laberge-Côté to create the transition between the two.
It must be understood that their exchange extends beyond physical material. Akshongay, the work that includes the “Lavender Fever Section,” acutely weaves mythologies from Bhattacharya and Laberge-Côté’s respective Bengali and French-Canadian backgrounds to tell a story of emancipatory love. In it, Bhattacharya channels the cosmic rage of Lord Shiva’s Rudra Tandava (dance of destruction) following Sati’s descent into the
Agni Kunda (sacrificial fire) while Laberge-Côté imagines a love story obstructed by the ocean, inspired by the medieval lullaby
Isabeau s’y promène. They pore over source materials and bring photographs, poems and films to the studio for mutual learning. It is this hunger and humility that deters their collaboration from becoming fetishization.
When asked what advice they offer for emerging artists in search of meaningful collaboration, Bhattacharya says: “Creating is hard. It is very easy to get sucked up into the seriousness of it.” To which Laberge-Côté adds: “Collaborate with people that will make you laugh.” And they do. Bhattacharya and Laberge-Côté are great friends with a sentient, emotional trust they have spent years building.