In Daniel Léveillé’s world, five dancers are at the mercy of gravity, each individually pulled by the full downward force of it, succumbing in different ways to its inevitability. And you could say Léveillé, at this point in his acclaimed career, is also being driven by inevitability. Having explored every facet of choreography down to its literally naked core, the Québécois dance icon says all that remained for him to challenge was the solo.
“I thought, at the time, to work exclusively with solos would make an obligation on me to dive into something,” says Léveillé, speaking in charmingly accented English by phone from Montreal.“It’s just impossible with solos to do 'nice' choreography or use the patterns we all know. I’ve been choreographing for 40 years so I know how to do that, but the solo is really tough in the sense that you have to focus on the essence of what you want to express.”
In Solitudes Solo, running Oct. 28-31 at the Firehall Arts Centre, four men and one woman tackle a series of eight rigorously choreographed solos set to Bach’s lonesome violins, themselves striving towards the next inevitable note.
The piece, crowned best choreographic work in 2013 by Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, tests not only the dancers’ physical abilities but the reassuring conventions of dance. Like Bernini sculptures awakened, jumps are no longer lighter than air, landing instead with statue-like thunder; leaps have no lead up to launch, leaving the dancers to expend colossal force to complete; poses are held while falling in interminably slow motion, the moments between leaving the audience only time to contemplate the forms before them.
“What I’m trying to achieve with my work now, is as far as possible show how fantastic, wonderful, beautiful, complex is the human being – the human body,” says the 52-year-old Léveillé. “That’s about it. The show is just a series of solos so, of course, there’s no story to be read about that. It’s just five different human beings in different situations of being with themselves.”
The work also marks a departure from his last acclaimed creative cycle which saw dancers, in works like Amour, acide et noix (2001) and La pudeur des icebergs (2004), bearing their fragile human condition on stage completely nude.
“I think that was enough of that,” he says, “in the sense that I didn’t see what it would add to my new creation. There was no reason for the dancers to be naked, but for the previous pieces there were many reasons – the pieces were absolutely not the same once they were danced naked or minimally dressed. This time it’s not about that,” he continues. “And it was a way for me to move away and not be recognized for my entire life for having done that,” he adds with a laugh. “As you know I’m not the only one who has used that ‘costume’. There are so many choreographers now that do [nudity]. And I was not the first one to do it either.”
• Solitudes Solo runs Oct. 28-31 at the Firehall Arts Centre (280 Cordova). Tickets start at $23 at FirehallArtsCentre.ca
