At this year's Venice Biennale, Montreal's dance scene shines brighter than ever

Some choreographers were thinking big as they prepared for the Venice Biennale dance program that began on June 22. Marie Chouinard, in the second year of her four-year mandate as Biennale dance artistic director, invited fellow Montrealers Jacques-Poulin Denis, Frédérick Gravel and Daina Ashbee to present works on a larger scale than any in their careers.

Since 1895, the prestigious Venice Biennale is an international arts festival presenting forums for cinema, music, theatre, visual art, architecture and dance. An invitation to present a work at the Biennale can result in worldwide attention for artists.

"I've dealt with big productions before, but this is the first time that it's my crew and my work on this kind of scale," says Gravel, speaking about Some Hope for the Bastards, his 90-minute work featuring nine dancers and a live rock band. A trained dancer, self-taught musician and composer, Gravel often cast himself in previous shows as a witty master of ceremonies who presented the dance numbers with ironic, light-hearted banter. His shows had an informal, relaxed party vibe — but, he notes, "it was not allowing the work to go into deeper views or feelings."

So, last year in Montreal, Some Hope for the Bastards showed a change of direction. Leading the band as usual, guitar in hand, he reduced the banter and pushed aggression and confrontation in his choreography. "I wanted to embrace the dark side of human nature, find a way to bring it to light and not condemn it or not go into it."

Our human flaws, to Gravel's mind, make us all "bastards."

He continues: "We all have flaws, so let's just work with that instead of thinking that we have some pure minds somewhere."

Like Gravel, Jacques Poulin-Denis is a dancer, choreographer and composer. For the past year, Poulin-Denis worked on Running Piece, a solo for Manuel Roque that had its world premiere at Montreal's Agora de la danse last April.

"Doing the choreography, the music and the concept was quite complicated," he says. "There's a lot of computer software and electronic programming."

Roque, a circus acrobat-turned-dancer, performs on a specially designed conveyor belt about one metre wide and almost three metres long. Colourful abstract images coordinated with his movement will flash on video screens.

"I wanted to explore the notion of time passing, and our contemporary mode of always being in a rush somewhere," says Poulin-Denis.

Poulin-Denis has shown smaller works in Europe, but, with the Biennale, he was offered an exceptional opportunity on such a large scale.

"The décor, the conveyor belt, [they] are pretty big. I've never had a tour like this. It's a bit dizzying to find myself part of the Biennale. The theatre where Running Piece will be presented [Teatro alle Tese] is so imposing that it could influence the look of my work."

On opening day of the dance program this year, Chouinard presented the Biennale's prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Award to American-born, Belgium-based choreographer Meg Stuart. That same day, Stuart staged the Italian premiere of her 2012 work, Built to Last.

Chouinard, this past weekend, also showed her own work. First, Compagnie Marie Chouinard performed a retrospective of 33 solos and duos in a two-hour show called Radical Vitality, Solos and Duets — which could be considered an update of her big retrospective, Les Solos 1978-1998, staged at the Biennale 20 years ago. The show included the brief Petite danse sans nom where a female dancer calmly drank water, urinated in a bucket and then exited. A scandal at its first showing in 1980, the work in 2018 Venice hardly caused a raised eyebrow. Apparently the audience understood that far from being vulgar, the solo represented, in human terms, the elemental transformations that constantly occur in the universe — a recurring theme in Chouinard's works.

Her second show involves 15 foreign dance students who will learn and perform her 1999 work 24 Preludes of Chopin as part of their three-month Biennale residency program. Thanks to a small budget increase, the students — all women this year — were lodged for the first time at the Biennale's expense.

"It's a real gift to them," says Chouinard. "I'm very proud of that."

Students will also dance a new work created by Daina Ashbee — born in British Columbia and now living in Montreal — who presented a solo and duet at the Biennale last year.

"It's going to be a challenge working with bigger groups of people — something for me to learn from," says Ashbee, who previously focused on intimate solos and duets.

Offering challenges fits into Chouinard's mentoring role.

"At last year's Biennale, I learned that I liked to teach artists and to instigate creation. I adore doing that."