Houdini of the Dance

For those who never considered choreography as the art of the magic, you need to read Deirdre Kelly writing in Critics at Large about Claudia Moore.

Now You See Her, Now You Don't: Dancer Claudia Moore

Claudia Moore (photo by Tamara Romanchuk)

By calling her latest show Escape Artist, Claudia Moore conjures an intriguing picture of herself as a kind of Houdini of the dance. Technically an illusionist, the death-defying escape artist alluded to in the title strives to be free of restraints, be they handcuffs, straitjackets or cages in a sea of sharks to name some of the claustrophobic situations these suspenseful performers have been employing since their arrival on the pop culture scene at the end of the 19th century. Moore, a seasoned dancer who is artistic director of her own MOonhORsE Dance Theatre company, obviously loves the concept. But her solo show of four commissioned works which played at Toronto’s Dancemakers Studio in the Distillery District during the last weeks of October (including a Hallowe’en performance where the audience was invited to come in costume) did not take the shackle and bust theme literally. In other words, no real chains only imagined ones.

Precision

The fact that for choreographer, Wayne McGregor, dance could also be something of a science experiment in his piece Entity, served as part of what fascinated critic Deirdre Kelly last year in her review in Critics at Large.

The Science Of Dancing: Wayne McGregor’s Entity

Entity, choreographed by Wayne McGregor (Photo: Ravi Deepres)

Talk about a ‘Eureka!’ moment: A dance performance that is also a science experiment, the focus of study being the body in motion. Audiences, put your thinking caps on.

Entity is the name of the brain puzzle of a dance in question, and it is an entirely new choreographed creature, owing its genesis to the mind as much as the body.

Choreographed in 2008 by Wayne McGregor (choreographer-in-residence at the Royal Ballet in England, and represented by his 10-member strong Random Dance troop, the resident company of Sadler’s Wells in London), the hour-long piece concludes its month-long Canadian tour in Toronto tonight at Harbourfront Centre: Run to get a ticket.

The result of 10 years of scientific inquiry, Entity is a hybrid born of a question (What happens inside the brain when people dance?) and of a collective desire, by both the choreographer and the international cast of extraordinary dancers, for extreme movement exploration. This exploration is made even more complicated by the fact each dancer has a distinct stage personality and presence.

Stepping Through the City of Light

While Paris might not be the dance capital, as Deirdre Kelly points out in Critics at Large, The Paris/Toronto Project has revived the city of light's stature.

Vive la difference: The Paris/Toronto Project (Opposites Do Attract)

It can't be dying, - it's too rouge, -. (Photo by Guntar Kravis)

Paris hasn’t been a dance capital since Marie Taglioni donned wings to dance La Sylphide more than 150 years ago, at the height of the Romantic era. Ballet in any event has always been the city’s strong suit, developed largely by the French court. Modern dance, a New World dance form, was invented by the barefoot American dancer Isadora Duncan who so hated the high-reaching artificiality of classical dance that she created a school of movement grounded in the earth and earthly concerns. Paris never really made that leap, not in ways significant enough to wrest back its reputation as a dance innovator. And so it came as a surprise when Toronto Dance Theatre (TDT), the city’s main exponent of the modern dance tradition as directed by Christopher House, announced that it had recently looked to Paris as the source of new creation for its own troupe of barefoot dancers, inviting French choreographers Alban Richard and Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh to Toronto to collaborate on the making of two new works. It felt like the dance equivalent of that old expression, bringing coal to Newcastle: what could Paris give what Toronto already had? Plenty, it has turned out.

What makes the Paris/Toronto Project such an artistic success is the very fact that the choreographers are from Paris, their foreignness giving them the advantage of being able to create here without the burden of knowing local dance traditions that might otherwise have compelled them to follow some kind of prescribed plan or pathway. As a result, each work on the program that opened last Thursday night, and continues through to Saturday at Winchester Street Theatre, represents a complete departure from anything TDT has done before, both in terms of movement vocabulary and ideas. It’s probably why the dancers, still the same solid troupe as before, look so different, in a heightened sense of the word, performing them – appearing bolder, more robust and fully present in the works at hand. This artistic experiment, sponsored on both sides of the Atlantic by government agencies representing both Canada and France, has definitely paid off. The choreographers surpass all expectations by creating works that are decidedly avant-garde while the dancers are newly inspired. They, for one, will now always have Paris as a fresh influence on their collective performing style: vive la difference.

Le Sacre

Today Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a repertory favourite. But as Kevin Courrier points out in Critics at Large, it was far from popular when it premièred in 1913.

Igor's Boogie: The Rites of Stravinsky

It should come as no surprise that if any one composer could cause a riot, it would be Igor Stravinsky. Unpredictable in nature, and comparable in stature to painter Pablo Picasso, Stravinsky was an enigmatic figure who moved like a chameleon through the cultural world. He made his reputation with his erotically charged masterpieces The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). Throughout these works, you could hear Stravinsky gradually forsaking the world of romanticism which would lead him to ultimately forge a new style of neoclassicism in 1920 with Pulcinella. Yet right at the moment when he was pioneering that phase of his musical career, he joined forces with his serialist adversaries, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg, who had abandoned classicism altogether. "People always expect the wrong thing of me," Stravinsky once said. "They think they have pinned me down and then all of a sudden – au revoir!"

Born in St. Petersberg in 1882, Stravinsky had such a great aptitude for music that the colourful Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov took him on as a pupil. In 1909, Russia's top impresario, Serge Diaghilev, heard two of Stravinsky's first compositions, Scherzo fantastique and Feu d'artifice, at a concert in St. Petersberg. He was so impressed that he commissioned Stravinsky to write a couple of numbers for a ballet he was producing. Out of that encounter came The Firebird which was an overnight success. While not as daring or innovative as his later ballet scores, The Firebird still had something more foreboding than the exotic colours of Rimsky-Korsakov. Diaghilev could hear immediately that Stravinsky's work had what author Joan Peyser in To Boulez and Beyond called "a latent barbarism." This "latent barbarism" would, of course, be even more explicit in his next work for Diaghlev titled Petrushka. This piece, with its polytonality and sharper rhythms, caused something of a small commotion.

Petrushka, the story of a puppet who is bestowed with life, premiered in 1911, with the legendary dancer Nijinsky in the title role. At the time, Nijinsky was revolutionizing ballet in much the same way that Stravinsky was revolutionizing music. They both were taking the formal decorum out of their respective art forms and releasing the inherent primal impulses in their pieces. The ballet featured parodic elements, repetitive rhythms, and passages where Stravinsky echoed the mechanical and soulless world in which Petrushka found himself. (For those with a keen ear, American composer Frank Zappa, who was influenced significantly by Stravinsky, once wrote a hilarious pop satire called "Status Back Baby." In the song, a young football star fears he's losing his status at his high school so he looks for affirmation from his peers by painting posters and joining De Molay. In the bridge of the song, Zappa plays a guitar solo that quotes the opening melody of Petrushka, driving the point home that if Stravinsky's ballet score is about a puppet that longs to be human, Zappa reverses the process by writing a song about a human who longs to be a puppet.) The composer also illuminated the dual elements in Petrushka's character – both his mechanical and human sides. "I had conceived the music in two keys in the second tableau as Petrushka's insult to the public," Stravinsky remarked. "I wanted the dialogue for trumpets in two keys at the end to show that his ghost is still insulting the public."

Northwest Ballet's performance of Petrushka

Though Petrushka caused some commotion, it was nothing compared to his next score, The Rite of Spring. This startling new piece was a culmination of what Stravinsky was working toward in The Firebird and Petrushka. "One day, when I was finishing the last pages of The Firebird in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision," he recalled. "I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring." The score called for the largest orchestra Stravinsky had ever assembled (and with plenty of percussion). This was no romantic rendering of the genial spirit within nature, or the renewing elements of the seasons; The Rite of Spring was about the scourge of dehumanization. Russian and Hungarian folk tunes were integrated into the score, but even if the themes were familiar to the ear, the instruments played them in unfamiliar registers. Stravinsky had the time signatures change rapidly after each bar. The bassoon sounded like it had a bad cold. Arpeggios blurted from woodwinds. Meanwhile, the pizzicato of the first violins set the pace, with running sequences filled with squawks, trills, and shrieks. The music prodded with an erotic force.

Forever Young

Who says that as dancers hit middle age, they should turn in their shoes? Certainly not Deirdre Kelly in this piece on the subject published in Critics at Large.

Oldies But Goldies: Toronto Heritage Dance Recycles Vintage Works Into Something New

Patricia Beatty

The heads in the audience, for the most part, were gray and nodding as around them swirled pre-show chatter touching on the weather, doctor’s appointments and 25th anniversary reunions. It was definitely an older crowd that gathered inside Toronto’s Winchester Street Theatre (80 Winchester Street) on Thursday night for an evening of dance, an art form notorious for its love affair with youth. Many in the house were ex-dancers whose own leaping days were far behind them. They had come not entirely for nostalgia’s sake, although the event gave reason enough for reminiscing: the program at hand promised an evening of revivals by local dance pioneers as well as the welcome return to the stage of some beloved local dancers, long retired. But more enticing (and worthy of a late night) was that this modern dance show, while celebrating the past, was actually something novel, marking as it did the debut of Toronto Heritage Dance, the new kid on the Canadian dance block with a backpack jammed with history.

The brainchild of veteran dance producer Nenagh Leigh in collaboration with Patricia Beatty, Toronto Heritage Dance aims to use work from the not-so-distant past (the oldest work on the current program is just 40) to jumpstart new creations for the 21st century. The idea, elaborated Leigh during a brief intermission chat, is to get audiences used to the idea of preservation as a means of fostering a re-invigorated dance future. Vintage is all the rage in fashion, film and home decor. So why not apply the trend to locally made dance? 

Sex and Dance

Our dance critic at Critics at Large, Deirdre Kelly, published her latest book this past fall and David Churchill spoke to her about its genesis.

Deirdre Kelly Discusses Her New Book: Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection

Deirdre Kelly (Photo: John Cullen)

Deirdre Kelly has been obsessed with dance and the ballerina since she was three years old. Much of her professional writing life has been devoted to looking at ballet and dance. Now, in her new book, Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection (Greystone Books: an imprint of D&M Publishers), she pulls back the curtain and gives us a rare peak behind the scenes at what it means in the past and the present to be a ballerina. She sat down with David Churchill recently to discuss her book and the history of the ballerina. Tomorrow, we will run an excerpt from her new book.

Taking Flight

When the veteran Alvin Ailey American Dance company, a vehicle for African American dancers since 1958, came to Toronto, Deirdre Kelly took the opportunity to wax eloquent on their artistic legacy in Critics at Large.

Rocka My Soul: The Ecstasy That is Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/02/rocka-my-soul-ecstasy-that-is-alvin.html

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Robert Battle's The Hunt. Photo by Paul Kolnik

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has landed in Toronto, and with an enormous amount of noise in the form of screams, cheers and ear-splitting hurrahs. The arrival of the New York-based troupe on our side of the border has always been cause for celebration; there’s no beating the potent physicality of the dancers, or the raw, often visceral connectedness an audience member feels for the choreography, often by a range of modern and contemporary dance artists.

But this time, there was added incentive for the standing ovation that greeted the company when on Thursday it gave the first of four scheduled performances at Toronto's Sony Centre of the Performing Arts. The run concludes today with matinee and evening performances of a mixed program. Since July, the 30-member ensemble has been guided by newly appointed director Robert Battle, a former dancer turned choreographer whose association with the Ailey company stems from 1999 when he was first appointed artist-in-residence.

Pop Fantasies

If our obsessions with pop, as fans, can create a multitude of fantasies, it's fitting that choreographers can put those fantasies to dance as Deirdre Kelly points out in this Critics at Large review.  

Love Lies Bleeding: A Pop Ballet That Really Pops

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/11/love-lies-bleeding-pop-ballet-that.html

The artists of Alberta Ballet rock out to "Benny and the Jets" in Love Lies Bleeding

Jean Grand-Maître took the stage at Toronto’s Sony Centre on Tuesday night, just moments before Alberta Ballet would perform the area premiere of his full-length Love Lies Bleeding, set to and directly inspired by the music of Elton John. Microphone in hand, Grand-Maître genially asked the capacity crowd how many had come to the ballet for the first time. A roar rippled through the auditorium and the Canadian choreographer smiled. It was a sign that his mandate of creating pop ballets for the Calgary-based company since becoming director in 2002 was indeed working: bums in seats, but more importantly, bums attached to people who might not otherwise be caught dead watching men in jock straps pointing their toes in an undulating sea of ballerinas. But as if wanting to quell any lingering reservations, Grand-Maître told the audience not to worry: “This is not really a ballet,” he continued. “It’s more like a rock concert. So sit back, relax and unleash your inner pop star.”

"Rocket Man": Yukichi Hattori, Company Artists

For the next two hours that is pretty much what happened. The crowd screamed, it sang, it clapped along; some in the house could be seen even dancing in their seats. At the end, it rose en masse to give the ballet an instantaneous standing ovation on top of prolonged applause. To ballet purists it was a somewhat different story. The choreography is more borrowed than original: Bob Fosse meets the cross-dressing Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, meaning lots of crotch thrusts and drag queens galore. Such details have entertainment value, but don’t necessarily advance the art form. Still, there was plenty to like, even admire. It is one of the few ballets to foreground men in ballet as opposed to women and for that is to be applauded as something rare indeed. It also has at its centre an aerial number, choreographed by Adrian Young, which literally sets the dancers flying, a wonder to behold. But the ballet scales heights in other ways: Love Lies Bleeding is the Alberta Ballet’s Tommy, a reference to the ballet inspired by The Who’s rock-opera of the same name created for Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in 1970 by resident choreographer by Fernand Nault, a work that first put Canadian ballet on the international map. So while not a new invention, Love Lies Bleeding is ballet for the masses whose popularity may bode well for the future of the art itself, enticing even more bums down the line to wiggle in their seats.

Legacies

Going up against tradition always poses risks. But when you're the National Ballet, risks become par for the course as Deirdre Kelly pointed out in her review of their production last winter of Romeo and Juliet.

You Don’t Want the Dancing to Stop: National Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/11/you-dont-want-dancing-to-stop-national.html

Guillaume Côté and Elena Lobsanova in  Romeo and Juliet. Photo by Bruce Zinger.

Creating something new from something established and old always poses a challenge. You have tradition to contend with, not to mention people’s expectations. This is perhaps especially true when dealing with a master like Shakespeare as Russian-born choreographer Alexei Ratmansky has done with Romeo and Juliet. 

The former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, now into his second term as artist in residence of New York’s American Ballet Theater, revisits not only literary tradition but also music and dance history.

A commission to commemorate the 60th anniversary season of the National Ballet of Canada, which is performing the new three-hour work at Toronto’s Four Seasons of the performing through Saturday with alternating casts, Ratmansky’s Romeo and Juliet is a tremendous accomplishment.

The Sublime Art of Frederick Wiseman

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Documentaries couldn't be more popular than they are today and one of the best at capturing a diverse range of subjects (and he's been doing it for years) is Frederick Wiseman.

The Truth is Out There: Frederick Wiseman's La Danse

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/truth-is-out-there-frederick-wisemans.html

These days, documentaries that tend to get commercial release are usually one of three kinds. There are the docs that feature the director as star, notably the films of Michael Moore (Capitalism: A Love Story,Sicko) and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?). There are the documentaries that really prove that truth is indeed stranger than fiction (Capturing the Friedmans,Crazy Love, Grizzly Man). There are the docs that are tied into current societal concerns and issues (An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., The Cove). And then there’s Frederick Wiseman.

Gestural Language

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

While dance is in part about interpretive movement, it is also about narrative. In the case of the Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre, as Deirdre Kelly smartly points out in Critics at Large, it is also about memoir.

Searching for Identity: Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/05/searching-for-identity-sashar-zarif.html

Katherine Duncanson, Sashar Zarif, Viv Moore, Marie-Josée Chartier, Sylvie Bouchard (Photo: Mahla Ghasempour)

The lights dim, the theatre fills with darkness, smoke and the sound of a hollow wind banging a door against its frame. A figure emerges from the shadows, moving slowly into view. With his hand he touches his open mouth before pushing the hand forward, palm-up, as if offering up to the audience the words he softly sings under his breath. With this simple gesture, Toronto dancer and choreographer Sashar Zarif sets the stage for his Solos of My Life, presented in conjunction with Toronto independent dance producer Danceworks whose three-performance run at Harbourfront’s Enwave Theatre in Toronto ends tonight. The title is misleading as the hour-long piece isn’t a solo, but more a series of danced vignettes performed with (in alphabetical order) Sylvie Bouchard, Marie-Josée Chartier, Katherine Duncanson and Viv Moore, women meant to embody the people he has known, loved, maybe even feared in his life: dance as memoir.

Sashar Zarif (Photo: Mahla Ghasempour)

Story-telling in dance has a long tradition, with mime and song often used to give meaning to the wordless art of the body. In telling his personal history, basically a narrative exploring his forced migration from his Persian homeland and the subsequent search for identity, Zarif goes further, employing a self-created form of gestural language that pulls from ancient Indian dance traditions as well as from the modern dance: Think deep-seated second-position plies meshed with percussive Kathak-inspired foot stomps and dancing eyes. Add bum-jumps, crab-crawls and sky-writing and you get the point. Almost.

Sashar Zarif (Photo: Dani Tedmuri)

While there’s much to admire here – the commitment of the individual performers for one, not to mention the evocative sound-score featuring created and partly performed live by Zarif with a heavily costumed Duncanson in collaboration with the always-fascinating Eric Cadesky and Arun Srinivasan’s dramatic lighting design – Solos For My Life come across as movement experimentation that lacks a clear idea as to how its results are to be ingested, analyzed, interpreted by the viewer. As such, it’s a personal journey that very much remains personal, rarely succeeding in striking a chord of empathy with the viewer as a result of being ultimately unclear about what it is trying to say. To compare it to a written narrative, what the so-called stories embedded inside this work might be served by, this is an imaginative recreation of a life that is richly atmospheric and populated by interesting characters – not the least being Zarif, a compelling performer with an empathetic stage presence – but whose weak thematic core undermines a sense of focus and relevance, qualities that might have prevented the piece from drifting without an evident conclusion: a work with too much beginning and middle and not enough end.

Through the Looking Glass

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland has captivated readers for so long that its various manifestations in film, music ("White Rabbit"), and dance, continues to bring enchantment. The National Ballet's production of the work last year even prompted Deirdre Kelly's review to come in the form of a 'letter' to Carroll.

Tumbling for Alice: National Ballet's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/06/tumbling-for-alice-national-ballets.html

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Photo by Manuel de los Galanes)

Letter to Lewis Carroll:

Took a tumble down the rabbit hole on Saturday night, courtesy the National Ballet of Canada’s vivid presentation of the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and what a wonderful experience it was. Bumped into the most delightful creatures, a lot of them born of your own imagination – the white rabbit, the nasty queen of hearts, the grinning Cheshire cat, and, of course, Alice, dear sweet Alice, who fell first down the dizzying spiral towards that veritable garden of visual delights punctuating the journey.

Your marvellous book, Alice in Wonderland, was the inspiration behind it all, and who knew such a literary classic would lend itself so delightfully to both a balletic translation and original score? Composer Joby Talbot has created a brilliant, bubbling, boisterous piece of music that readily captures the kaleidoscopic character of own multi-tone prose-style and verse.

Singing the Body Electric

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

What makes dance so exciting is how the performers, with the help of a great choreographer, can make the body seem even more physically expressive than what already holds in our imagination. Deirdre Kelly had such an experience last year while watching the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform Polaris.

Larger-Than-Life: Paul Taylor Dance Company

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/04/larger-than-life-paul-taylor-dance.html

 "Polaris" Photo by Lois Greenfield

The wonderful thing about well-trained dancers? Just how wonderful they are. You can’t take your eyes off them, or stop marvelling at their ability to seem larger-than-life and super-human, creatures propelled into greatness by the strength and skill of bodies leashed to the hand of an expert teacher and choreographer. Such was the thought inspired by watching members of Paul Taylor Dance Company perform earlier this week at the Markham Theatre, located north of Toronto, as part of the New York’s troupe’s recent, four-city Ontario tour.

Pina Bausch: A Choreographic Maverick

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

One of the most important qualities a critic needs to have is the ability to take the audience inside a work, to deepen both their understanding of it and where possible deepen their love for it. In this terrific piece by our dance critic Deirdre Kelly, she not only takes us further into the movie but also its subject.

Performing Without Inhibition: Wim Wenders' Pina

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/12/performing-without-inhibition-wim.html

"Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost."

                                             Pina Bausch

Watching Wim Wenders' hauntingly poignant and unique film about the choreographic genius of Pina Bausch, I was reminded that when I was younger I didn’t want to run away and join the circus; I wanted to join Tanztheater Wuppertal, the internationally acclaimed German dance troupe that Bausch directed from 1973 until her untimely death in 2009.

I saw her extraordinary dancers, culled from all corners of the globe, for the first time in 1984 during a rare visit of the troupe to Toronto. The piece was The Rite of Spring, and the stage was covered with spoil (dirt, peat and other detritus) that turned to mud soon after the dancers started marking it with the sweat of their extraordinary effort. Together with the approximately 2,000 spectators who thronged to the theatre that night, drawn by Bausch’s reputation as an award-winning dance artist, I watched spellbound from the edge of my seat, eyes wide open, a lump in my throat.

Kinetic Spitfire

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

For the first year, Critics at Large covered pretty much all of the arts except dance. Truth told, none of us could write about it with any authority. So it came as a welcome surprises last spring when we were approached by one of Canada's best dance critics, Deirdre Kelly. Naturally, her first piece was a splendid portrait of a veteran Canadian choreographer.

Louise Lecavalier: Still Crazy (But More Glorious) After All 

These Years

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/04/louise-lecavalier-still-crazy-but-more.html.

Louise Lecavalier & Keir Knight (Photo : Massimo Chiarradia)

Dancer Louise Lecavalier's new company is Fou Glorieux, which roughly translated as "glorious craziness." And the craziest thing about it? How mind-blowingly good it is. Fou Glorieux is contemporary Canadian dance at its most kinetically expressive, if not poetically potent. The reason is Lecavalier, the diminutive dynamo whose kamikaze dance style helped make Édouard Lock's La La La Human Steps an international cause célèbre throughout the 1980s and 1990s when she was the Montreal choreographer's hard-bodied, platinum blonde star and muse.