Laying a Hand on a Thigh. And Doing Nothing More.

The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, nor does the writer write on a blank page, but the page or canvas is already so loaded with pre-existing, pre-established clichés that it is first necessary to erase, clean, flatten, or even shred in order to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us vision.1 1  - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 204.

Situated at the intersection of theatre, dance, and circus, Nicolas Cantin sees the black box as a virgin canvas. Extremely visual, his works stage objects, among them, the body. Clean and minimal, and more bastard than hybrid, his pieces tend to construct performance as a kind of moving tableau. More a dramaturge of time and space than a creator of movement, he above all foregrounds the “living”: “I’m interested in the intimate. More than anything, I like to look at people who are unaware they are being observed. I like to witness that instant in which acting ceases. When I look at you, it’s like observing a deer in the middle of the forest. Victory is a magnificent thing, but, strangely, there is something even more moving in the spectacle of defeat. There is beauty in the image of a boat run aground. I’m at the beginning of something. Today, all that interests me is seeing people on stage in the simplest of ways, people who allow our gaze to fall on them. And I think that that is already a great deal.”² 2 - Nicolas Cantin, presentation text for Grand singe (2009) (Own translation).