Ballets Jazz Montréal celebrates its 50th anniversary with a contemporary dance program, Essence. The new artistic director, Alexandra Damiani, chose for the occasion three works by female choreographers, Aszure Barton, Crystal Pite and Ausia Jones. The latter is a young performer in the company. Ballets Jazz Montréal wants to underline its heritage with the first two and position itself for the future with Ausia Jones, a new choreographer who is said to be confident, spontaneous, and who uses groove and counterpoint.
The tragic love story between the courtesan Marguerite Gauthier and the young bourgeois Armand Duval lends itself perfectly to a romantic ballet. Canadian choreographer Peter Quanz transposed the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils into four tableaux: L’amour, Le sacrifice, Rhapsody and Le trépas. The musical framework is based on the works of female composers such as Lili Boulanger, Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann, under the direction of German conductor Florian Ziemen.
We have seen him perform on the stage in the theater as well as giving substance to creations by Dave St-Pierre, Mélanie Demers and Catherine Gaudet, among others. Here the sunny Francis Ducharme joins forces with two talented women and long-time accomplices, the director Brigitte Haentjens and the choreographer Catherine Gaudet, who invited him to embody the myth of the tragic hero in this proposal entitled Mains sweaty. On stage, his breath will carry a dense text, a quilt of the greatest tragic classics, and a complex and breathtaking gestural score of which Gaudet has the secret, confronting monsters, forces of evil, temptations, giving life to these complex and larger than life characters. with implacable destinies, which shake up the order of the world. An ambitious creation, an immense challenge that we can’t wait to see take shape.
Through the always acclaimed Akram Khan and Crystal Pite, Quebecer Anne Plamondon slips in, offering the Danse Danse audience a new creation. She has been known as a performer (Crystal Pite, RUBBERBAND) with fine sensitivity and momentum where grace and mastery are equal, but she is also a choreographer in her own right. Recently, she created a piece for the Alberta Ballet and she also signed some choreographies for Vanishing Mélodies (Ballets Jazz Montreal). Here, she gives life, using both body and voice, to a septet in a proposal that resonates with the sense of urgency that dominates our time, a quest for meaning that passes through the ties woven in a community. . This new piece, whose title remains unknown, unfolds on the so-called hypnotic music of Olivier Fairfield.
Fans of the show Révolution will recognize Charles-Alexis Desgagnés, who made it to the final during the 2018 edition. Choreographer and performer who made an impression with his presence on stage, he offers at the Agora de la danse a promising solo, L’appel des embers. Creation ventures into dreamlike territory, as a being moves, reinvents itself, seeks to emancipate itself from codes and identities in a score all in modulations and tensioning of the body. Naked, animal physicality, exuberance through lights and costumes will be invited in this experience that we promise to be unpredictable. Intriguing!
