When, in the 1980s, the iconoclastic and hard-chic force of La La La Human Steps by Édouard Lock burst onto the Canadian and then international choreographic scene, it was she who literally embodied the extraordinary innovative capacity of the group’s physical language. With long, straw-yellow hair and a muscular, taut body—more of an Amazon than a sylph—Louise Lecavalier darted in horizontal bursts, crashing into her partner, ready to take revenge on male oppression with a violent, suffocating physicality that continually unsettled both her partner and us spectators with unpredictable shifts in space and rhythm. Some will still recall the shocking and dazzling impact of this dance, immortalized in David Bowie’s videos or in Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days, a perfect expression of these frantic, alienating times, where the chiaroscuro of feelings gives way to a raw brutality with no escape.
Retiring in 1999 from Lock’s company to focus on her private life (and to give the world two daughters), Louise, with her fiery legs, experienced this intimacy as a kind of artistic palingenesis that allowed her to return to the stage for projects tied to her new artistic and expressive needs. More slender, with her hair returned to a natural color and a physicality more attentive to minute details rather than the ancient explosion of energy, Louise began collaborating with other important figures of the contemporary Canadian scene, favoring a line of inquiry more focused on listening to the body and the evocative power of energy subtraction.
This is clearly seen in I’ Is Memory, a challenging and demanding solo by conceptual choreographer Benoît Lachambre, in which Lecavalier even loses her supporting structure, becoming mere muscle mass that “melts” inside a jogging suit that amplifies her incredible loss of corporeality, in a play of tensions and body dominance of powerful hypnotic force.
In contrast—premiered here for the first time—Children, a creation by Nigel Charnock, the turbulent dance-maker and founder of DV8. The first step in a new interpretive journey for Lecavalier, this piece promises to condense all the “fetish” themes of the restless British artist, capable of mixing different bodily idioms (voice included) to interpret his vision of the human condition. But above all, it promises to reveal an additional aspect of one of the dancers who has most stimulated the collective imagination of the past twenty years and who, with great intelligence, has managed to evolve and innovate, while still retaining that special Star Quality that led to her being compared, upon her debut, to none other than Nijinsky.
