Louise Bédard — Louise Bédard Danse

LOUISE BÉDARD, CHOREOGRAPHER AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Louise Bédard is an artist in her own right. For more than thirty years she has been mixing her career as a choreographer and performers. After completing her dance training, notably with Groupe Nouvelle Aire, Louise Bédard was quickly noticed as a talented performer. During the 1980’s, she collaborated with many choreographers and artists. Already in 1983, Louise was awarded the Canada Council’s Jacqueline-Lemieux Award, for her outstanding work. In 1987, she co-founded the Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique that currently provides her with rehearsal and creation space. She becomes more and more aware of the true richness of dance as a language and decides to try her hand at choreographing herself. She formed her own company in 1990: Louise Bédard Danse. Since then, she has created more than 30 dance pieces for her company as well as around 15 commissions for other groups and artists.

APPROACH

The dancers’ human dimension and interactions between different generations are at the heart of her creations. They addresse topics such as otherness, identity, belonging to the world and femininity. The work and the path of women artists, painters, visual artists, sculptors, photographers from here or elsewhere, are the bases on which she relies regularly and until today to enrich her imagination and her approach. They are artists that she has also made discovered through parallel activities to her shows.

Her choreographic work is strongly influenced by her personal background as a performer. Louise Bédard creates and presents her works as structures in successive layers that give her imagination its fullest expression. Space, places, visual arts and objects are often at the core of her works. Her choreographic language is often described as a fine one, describing the human strenght and fragility, letting the subjectivity taking place in each one. Louise’s multiple experiences bring her to come closer to the essence of the movement, that lets her the necessary space to free her boundless imaginary.

AWARDS AND HONOURS

2018: Prix de la Danse de Montréal - performer category
2016: Finalist in dance – 31st Grand Prix du Conseil des Arts de Montréal
2005: Finalist in dance – 21st Grand Prix du Conseil des Arts de Montréal
1997: John A. Chalmers National Dance Award
1996: Prix d’Auteur des 5e Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis
1983: Jacqueline Lemieux Prize