woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131At the beginning of Catherine Gaudet\u2019s Tout ce qui va, revient<\/em>, performer Sarah Dell\u2019Ava announces that her birthday has recently passed\u2014which 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\u2019Ava looks directly at us during this address, and her gaze remains conspicuously unbroken for much of the performance.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nThe piece emerged from scholar, dancer, and rehearsal director Christine Charles\u2019s 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\u2019Ava\u2019s gaze, initially casual and welcoming, engenders conviviality, a tone which soon begins to shift as her ways of looking become increasingly mercurial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gaudet\u2019s piece was presented by the OFFTA alongside Mine de rien<\/em> by Marie Mougeolle and Liane Th\u00e9riault. While these works formed a program more eclectic than it was cohesive, they did share an interest in looking. Like Tout ce qui va, revient<\/em>, Mougeolle and Th\u00e9riault\u2019s piece begins with eye contact. The two dancer-choreographers enter the small performance space looking directly at the audience. And similar to Dell\u2019Ava, Mougeolle and Th\u00e9riault continue to meet our gaze for much of the work\u2019s duration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mine de rien<\/em> presents a concise set of ideas, effectively rendered. What are the dynamics of rehearsal, what are the dynamics of performance, and what happens when they are juxtaposed in front of an audience? Throughout the first section of the piece, the two performers discuss their process of working through the choreography. They make observations: \u201cI\u2019m having trouble with the space today.\u201d They remark on a particular difficulty with floor work, or note that spectators seated in the back may not be able to see what is going on with their feet. After a period of prolonged exploration, one of the dancers looks up, gives a cue, and with a sudden shift of light and music, the \u201cperformance\u201d begins. Mougeolle and Th\u00e9riault now move through choreography with the silence and consistency most might expect from a dance performance, a striking contrast from moments before. And as we begin to recognize familiar gestures and choreographic sequences from the first section of the piece, the distinction between these two modes intensifies. While repetition relies on similarity, it also reveals difference. By repeating movements within a new set of performative conventions, Mougeolle and Th\u00e9riault emphasize the mediating effect of these codes, and their impact on how we perceive and understand choreography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unlike Mine de rien<\/em>, Gaudet\u2019s piece never produces the clear delineations we usually expect from a performance. While the former renders its explorations clearly and succinctly, Tout ce qui va, revient<\/em>presents a more discordant, and perhaps richer, proposition. After her announcement, Dell\u2019Ava positions herself centre stage, seemingly on the cusp of \u201cbeginning,\u201d before she regresses back into giggles brought on by something or other distracting her in the audience. Regaining composure, she assures the audience she will be ready to start soon. Slowly, her observation of the audience leads to imitation. Dell\u2019Ava\u2019s mimicry, her postures of interested spectatorship, eventually give way to a maniacal grin. And this, too, changes form, as Dell\u2019Ava reconfigures her expression until she begins to cry in a state of extreme tension and apparent anguish. What begins as a play of looking and being looked at modulates to become a complex choreography of emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her volume The Cultural Politics of Emotion<\/em>, Sara Ahmed discusses the \u201csociality of emotion,\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion<\/em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 8.<\/span> describing how emotions \u201cshape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Ibid., 4.<\/span> Ahmed\u2019s theories may be useful in parsing how Gaudet\u2019s work constructs the entities of performer and spectator in a choreographic exchange charged with perpetually shifting emotion. In one section of the piece, Dell\u2019Ava describes how much she adores her birthday, subsequently accusing her audience of not caring, then shouting angrily at us in a Donald Duck voice that is both comedic and alienating. In another moment, she enters the space where the spectators are seated, moving in lurches and gyrations. Dell\u2019Ava approaches one spectator and gestures as if about to strangle them, before her movement melts into a tender massage. In such instances of radical affective fluctuation, Gaudet\u2019s choreography demands that we constantly reconsider our subjectivity, and that of the dancer we encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At times sinister and endearing, the work\u2019s refusal to settle in one emotional register encourages us to think beyond how the performance makes us feel, and consider how our feelings, and the choreographed feelings of the performer, make, modulate, slip from, or stick to what Ahmed might call the \u201cemotional object\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid., 5.<\/span> that is the performance. Of course this object remains both tantalizingly and disconcertingly elusive amidst the choreography\u2019s constantly shifting affective ground. Perhaps all we can conclude with any certainty is that performances may be like birthdays: things we can relish, rebuke, celebrate, or deny, but that inevitably shape us as much as we shape them.<\/p>\n\n\n