Australian Gravity Troupe
The Pulse, which will be presented from July 5 to 8 at La Tohu, will bring together no less than 60 artists on stage – 24 acrobats and 36 singers from the Orfeò Català Girls’ Choir. Girls in their early twenties who will be accommodated here with Catalan families or chorister families.
Created in 2021, the imposing acrobatic piece directed by Darcy Grant is built from a soundtrack composed by the Australian Ekrem Eli Phoenix.
La Tohu speaks of a “Circassian phenomenon” that immerses us in a “sensory experience where a mountain of bodies plunge into an ocean of ever-changing voices, strings and rubber bands”.
Gravity
The Australian troupe returned two years later to present that same show, then in 2018 to present their Backbone show, of the same cloth, with its insane playful challenges where human prowess was pushed to its extreme limit.
The general and artistic director of La Tohu, Stéphane Lavoie, is delighted with the arrival of this troupe, which presented The Pulse last summer at the Edinburgh festival. “We are lucky, he tells us, because this is not a show that was intended to travel. But the Australian government wanted to encourage its companies to shoot, so there was a favorable context. »
It remains that The Pulse will not travel a lot, hence the luck for MCC to have grabbed hold of this production to open its festival.
Stéphane Lavoie speaks of a “monumental” show-event that relies on “strength in numbers”. “We will be 900 to share with them this moment, which has something sacred. Contrary to the more intimate shows of the company, we are here in the great deployment, but the material of the show remains the body of the acrobat, there is still no device on stage.
Australia will not be the only country invited to the 14th Complètement Cirque festival, which will take place from July 6 to 16. Stéphane Lavoie tells us that France, Mexico, Argentina and the United States will also be represented. “Half of the invited companies come from abroad,” he tells us. If we want our companies to tour, we have to host foreign shows, and there are a lot of them! »
Montréal Complètement Cirque will present more than 10 indoor shows. The full lineup will be unveiled the week of May 1. The external program will be revealed around mid-May.
The festival’s co-artistic director, Nadine Marchand, who announced her departure from MCC at the end of the last edition, will not be replaced, says Stéphane Lavoie, head of programming for Tohu and the festival. Pascale Bélanger, who is executive producer at Tohu, is now (also) executive producer of the festival. She will thus work closely with Stéphane Lavoie, who remains the big boss of the event.
