When you trace the steps of Serge Bennathan’s latest creative journey backwards, it leads to cancer. Three years ago, the decorated Canadian choreographer faced down that life-changing diagnosis and triumphed, but the experience left Bennathan with an urgency he says he hadn’t felt prior.
“Three years ago I had a health problem, and from this health problem came urgency. [The urgency] to talk to people,” Bennathan recalls, speaking with Westenderby phone one evening last week, “but more specifically, I had to talk poetically. I had to say what I think about artists.”
Out of that epiphany came Just Words, a powerful, poetic dance experience encompassing the life and journey of the artist, premiering April 27-30 at the Firehall Arts Centre.
“Little by little,” says Bennathan, “the word artist replaced for me words like dancer or choreographer. I find the artist extremely courageous, [...] and I have an extraordinary respect and admiration for people who spend their lifetime as artists.”
The Jacqueline Lemieux Award-winning choreographer is referring not to only himself, but to the countless other dancers, composers and creatives he has met throughout his illustrious four-decade-long career. Born in Normandy, France, in 1957, Bennathan’s pursuit of dance in his home country included professional liaisons with the likes of Roland Petit in Paris and Rosella Hightower in Cannes, as well as the creation of his own company as a young dancer before emigrating to Canada in 1985.
Once here, Bennathan landed with Le Groupe de la Place Royale in Ottawa, where he danced for two years before moving to Vancouver to focus on choreography, creating emotionally explosive works with troupes such as EDAM, Ballet British Columbia, and Judith Marcuse Projects, as well as befriending dance legends like the late Grant Strate.
In 1990, Bennathan moved yet again, this time to Toronto, where he served as artistic director of the pioneering new-dance company, Dancemakers, before a final return to Vancouver in 2006 to found his current company, Les Productions Figlio.
And while Canada and its artistic community embraced Bennathan warmly, the choreographer says those early days of migrancy left an indelible sense of longing and a world of ghosts in his soul.
Just Words is Bennathan’s romanticized portrait of this spiritual assailing, as well as the profound and joyous moments of an artistic life well lived.
In the performance, Bennathan (an accomplished writer and librettist in his own right) recites original text, set to music by Bertrand Chénier, as powerhouse dancers Karissa Barry and Hilary Maxwell render the emotions of the piece through movement around him.
“The [choreography] is to try to go with the power of the body,” says Bennathan. “The physical power, but also the power of the tenderness, the power of vulnerability, the power of abandoning yourself, and the power to dive into a new life without knowing where you land.”
