Territoires Féminins, Women’s Territories2008, (1h 15 min.) Music : Éric Auclair [...] continuation following |
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photo GalLery
Photos Catherine Valois
video excerpt
Choreography and stage performance: Marie-Claude Rodrigue
Video performance : Myriam Farger
Stage direction, script adaptation, film direction, camera : Marie-Claude Rodrigue
Rehearsal coach and assistant director : Anne-Marie Jourdenais
Video editing : Mélanie Ladouceur
Videographer : Meena Murugesan
Music composer : Éric Auclair
Songs composer and singer : Laur Fugère
Translation and narration : Marcela Pizarro
Costume designer : Annie Gélinas
Costume assistant : Marie-Andrée De Courval
Set design : Claudia Bernal
Lighting design and technical direction : Karine Gauthier
Informed by Native and Taoist rituals, inspired by contemporary texts, Marie-Claude Rodrigue pays homage to the ancestral knowledge carried by today’s women shamans.
« Women’s Territories » is the journey of initiation of a woman who goes through an interior transformation which allows her to become conscious of the power of her feminine energy.
Through shamanic ecstasy, she yields to her feminine intuition and communicates with the spirit of her Native great-grandmother, thereby discovering the heritage of her female lineage.
Guided by mysterious forces, the protagonist experiences rites of passage and vision quests that transport her into awakened states of consciouness and give her access to the collective unconscious of women, a feminine world both invisible and timeless yet alive in her.
Straddled by the spirit of divinities and ancestors, the body of the dancer successively becomes an altar, an offering, a horse, a mirror, a receptacle, and then succumbs to the shamanic rapture, exorcises her demons, dives into the silence of mourning, explodes into a celebration and finally reaches a gentle prophetic ecstasy.
« Women’s Territories » touches upon the theme of identity and the notion of defending one’s territory, as an analogy for the struggle of the modern woman who must fight to preserve within and around herself what can be called the territory of feminine wisdom, linked to the female part of life, a sacred territory threatened with extinction by a society disproportionately ruled by Yang laws.
Following the cycle of the four seasons, the sacred dance takes us into the great feminine principles which, according to Chinese tradition, are rooted in the Yin energy, such as receptivity, pregnancy, positive darkness, death, surrender, maternity, rootedness, contemplation, gentle growth, slowness, celebration.
These feminine qualities are expressed through body work based on interiority, roundness, natural simplicity, implosion and are carried by movements of a wild and sensual character.
The piece is punctuated with poems drawn from the books I Sit Listening to the Wind and Circle of Stones by Judith Duerk, adapted by Marie-Claude Rodrigue and translated and read by Marcela Pizarro.
For the press document and all the technical information please click here.
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Terre2006, (18 min.) short film. |
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A form of danced ritual was created with the special participation of an urban shaman woman who transmitted orally some of her beliefs and rituals of protection. The theme is the reclaiming of an urban feminine territory. A garden on Main Street (St. Lawrence Blvd) was transformed into a sacred space for several days. This little film illustrates the complicity between women of different generations, a sort of shamanic journey through earth, a ritual of purification and transformation. How can city women reconnect with their feminine nature, with the ancestral wisdom, with the spirit of their totem animal, with the sense of sacredness ?
photo GalLery
Photos Luciano Venegas
video excerpt
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Tangorazon2004 (30 minutes) Choreographer : Marie-Claude Rodrigue |
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The space where we find three men wholeheartedly crossing the abyss between the need to love and the fear of losing, the need to be touched and the fear of opening up; between force and fragility, between man as adult and man as child. The fire of the heart burns, the heart beats accelerate, a father and a son meet. The tango embraces the pain of the injured child, the adults put their men’s suits back on and wear, like wings, their gut-wrenching solitude. The feminine presence lurks around, delicately manipulating these fleeting hearts.
photo GalLery
Photos Roline Laporte
video excerpt
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Palestra tanguera2003 (25 minutes) |
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In “Palestra Tanguera”, a woman and her shadow face off in the ring, no way out except distraction, resistance, blindness and forgetting. In a carnal, animal duel it is exhaustion that brings us to the brink of glimpsing light through the cracks. The male musician stays out of the ring; he observes and dismembers, by way of his bow, this feminine body that is fighting between control and abandon.
The song goes: ¿Por qué tendré que amar y al fin partir? Why should I have to love and then leave?
photo GalLery
Photos Roline Laporte
video excerpt
November 2005 Premiere Dance Theatre, SooRyu Dance Festival, Toronto
November 2005 Tangolab, Montréal
Mai 2004 Tangente, Série Dança Danza, Montréal
February 2004 Studio de la Rotonde, Correspondanse, Québec
November 2003 C.E.G.E.P Beauce Appalaches, St-Georges
September 2003 Union Française, Festival Victor Jarra, Montréal
June 2003 Dancing Mocha Jo, Montréal
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Tango sous influences, (Tango under influences)
Mai 2004 Tangente, Série Danza! Dança! Montréal
A Ball/Performance presenting a fragmented vision of a tango up-rooted and stripped down. An attempt to reconstruct a tango eroded by time, damaged by exile, deformed by nostalgia, shattered by lapses of the memory but nonetheless living, modern, and magnified through a creative crossbreeding and the need to meet heart to heart. The show “Tango sous influences” dissects this form of partner dance, allowing the dynamism of opposing forces to surge forward, harmonic within its contradictions and the indispensable imbalances in every movement.
The creation of this performance sprang from the choreographer’s (Marie-Claude Rodrigue) meeting with a Chilean immigrant couple, for whom the tango has been and is still the fertile ground where their romantic passions may blossom. “José Ulíses and Rebeca have been together for 61 years and the story of these tender lovers is the most beautiful tango life has ever let me witness”. Marie-Claude has let herself be impermeated by their living memories and has drawn her inspiration from the tumult of feelings expressed through their anecdotes, their dramas and their passions.
It is a tango under the influences of the emotional release of two eternal lovers, decoded by a North American spirit and set free by the bodies of contemporary dancers.
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- Commissioned Works -
Wu Xing, les cinqs saisons de l’énergie
December 2008 (30 min.)
Produced by LADMMI
Presented at Théâtre La Chapelle on December 11-12-13, 2008
Throughout history, in all civilisations, the nature that surrounds us has been considered by we humans as a reflection of our inner functions, be they physiological or psychological. Man has always found, in his natural environment, the references and landmarks he needed to define his own cycles.
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Frontières
Mai 2007 (30 min.)
Produced by LADMMI,
Presented at the Monument National
Borders, mountain ranges, oceans separate us. Stock markets, empires, utopian ideals divide us, and so do bloodlines, beliefs and fears, all of which are closed spaces that emprison man in so many systems. But we also have poetry, symbols, rites and dreams to unite us, like perpertually moving territories, open spaces that afford men a soul as vast as the horizon.
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La Llorona,
Mai 2005 (25 min.)
Théâtre Gabrielle Roy, Spectacle de l’École de danse de Québec. Back to top
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