Mine de rien by Marie Mougeolle and Liane Thériault & Tout ce qui va, revient by Catherine Gaudet

At the beginning of Catherine Gaudet’s Tout ce qui va, revient, performer Sarah Dell’Ava announces that her birthday has recently passed—which explains the streamers casually strung about the theatre, as well as the vodka shots and party hats offered to audience members upon re-entry from intermission. Dell’Ava looks directly at us during this address, and her gaze remains conspicuously unbroken for much of the performance.

The piece emerged from scholar, dancer, and rehearsal director Christine Charles’s thesis work, which examines the gaze of the dancer in theory and practice, through a process of research-creation. Of course, as a multitude of theorists from Laura Mulvey to Maurice Merleau-Ponty explain, looking does many things, and affects bodies in many ways. Dell’Ava’s gaze, initially casual and welcoming, engenders conviviality, a tone which soon begins to shift as her ways of looking become increasingly mercurial.