BRAISE BLANCHE - PALE EMBERS
(ou la mémoire d’un hiver enseveli)
(or the memory of a buried winter)

Pale Embers has gone through several stages, levels, and sources of inspiration. I preferred to take it from the tragic fate of women rather than the lightness and hysteria from which we have been catalogued so long. Given the lightness of my female body, I wanted to regain that weight, and charge me with a certain burden to deliver a powerful work.

Dancing this piece, I was not only myself, I was alternately child, adolescent, adult, phantom, wave, flowing time, sharp blade, boat drifting, lonely abandoned woman, tree in flames, dowser, cow at night, transparency, fire-flame, ash, dust, crying tree, someone that’s no getting rid of his demons. This is more than the memory of the fourteen women who shoved me in the end, it is urgency of opening a voice, mine, let it be said while it looks at me doing. Surprisingly, the body never really rebelled; he understood what was expected of him. I have not adulated him; it was in the order of things, especially mines. I think it’s a beautiful gift I gave myself, because to have the feeling that one reaches the indescribable is more than the performance itself, but it’s still performance.

Louise Bédard

ARTISTIC CREDITS

Year of creation : 1990
Running time : 55 minutes

Choreographer and dancer : Louise Bédard
Animated film : Pierre Hébert
Original music : Robert Marcel Lepage
Set up design and costume : Marc-André Coulombe
Make up : Angelo Barsetti
Lighting design : Jean-Philippe Trépanier
Photography : Robert Etchevery and Yves Dubé