Since the 1980s, Canadian dance has captured universal attention with personalities and creations marked by high compositional boldness and extreme physical virtuosity. Initially, it was the Anglophone Canada that conveyed attention, stimuli, and proposals, serving as the gateway for American postmodern visions, beginning with the fundamental conceptual and linguistic revolution of Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation. However, since the 1970s, interest rapidly shifted to Francophone Canada, also thanks to the creative vitality of the Refus Global movement, a group of artists from various disciplines (including dance) strongly influenced by French surrealist painting and the need to express the intimate urgencies of the unconscious. Initially judged as the leading choreographic figure of the movement was Françoise Sullivan, endowed with a singular expressive vein dominated by the recovery and use of energies with ancestral echoes. But more than her, it was her students, such as Jean-Pierre Perreault and especially Ginette Laurin, who brought the new choreography from Quebec to the international stage. After collaborating with other emerging names in the New Canadian Dance, starting with Édouard Lock, she founded a company/manifesto in 1984 that immediately placed her among the leading names in the choreography of her country, O Vertigo. As the name suggests, the company testifies to Laurin's extraordinary taste for vertigo, the attraction of emptiness, imbalance, and suspension, to the point of making gravity an even debatable concept. Clear, darting, at times violent dynamics, revealing inner discomfort, existential unease, a desire for rebellion and affirmation, are the traits that characterize her poetics. This is well demonstrated by La Chambre Blanche, which, at its Italian premiere at the Intercity Canada Festival in 1994, literally caused a sensation. The imagination is struck by the ability to assign the disciplined yet genuinely sincere bodies of the dancers the task of describing the various reactions arising from the discomfort of a condition of physical, moral, and spiritual claustrophobia. The White Room, therefore, becomes a room of a mental asylum, but also a prison, or a nuptial chamber, or perhaps just a virtual room of consciousness, in short, any place where the individual appears totally defenseless, surrendered, and intimately fragile in their fears and anxieties. Vertigo, displacement, and the constantly interrupted search for a permanent center of gravity become elements of a virtuosic choreography and instruments of a body dramaturgy that strikes for its evocative violence. Revised by the author in 2008 to celebrate the twenty-five years of the company’s activity and re-edited with new lights and music by Nicolas Bernier and Jacques Poulin-Denis, La Chambre Blanche, on its third world tour, has lost none of its powerful ability to violently bring forth the most repressed emotions of being, its fragility, and immense solitude. Indeed, with the choice of new interpreters, more aware than ever of the dualism between physical energy and expressive surrender required by the piece, this hard and pure work confirms itself as both a mirror of a golden moment in the recent history of international dance and a classic for our restless time.
http://www.overtigo.com/
