LA FEMME OVALE (re-enactment: 2023)

La femme ovale, a re-enactment of Louise Bédard Danse company, will be presented at different times and places next spring. Dancers Lucie Vigneault and Marilyn Daoust will share the role of La femme ovale, which they will dance in several Maisons de la Culture: St-Laurent, Montréal-Nord, Pointe-aux-trembles, Ahuntsic and Plateau Mont-Royal. Tickets are free, but it is preferable to reserve your place two weeks before the shows.

The relationship I have with the dancers I work with often begins with a meeting in the studio. This meeting allows us to see if there is a possibility and a potentiality to approach our ways of conceiving and doing dance.   It is only afterwards that we dive into the work of creation or revival.

The desire to relive such a moment came to me during the pandemic.  The desire to be in the studio not alone but accompanied was stronger than anything else.  I wanted to be in the concrete of something known to share, hence the idea of remounting the solo La femme ovale with two fabulous dancers Marilyn Daoust and Lucie Vigneault.  To my great pleasure, they accepted the invitation I extended to them. Their enthusiasm encouraged me not only to perform an excerpt of the piece as I had originally planned, but to reconstruct the entire work in order to give each of them the chance to live a vibrant experience over time.

A re-enactment is in a way an exercise in memory, which consists in revisiting the sources and their variations that propelled us to create a work. It is also a fascinating moment that can be compared to a reunion. It is full of elements on which, with hindsight, it is possible to put words.  To transmit today the solo of La femme ovale, to make it available, confers to me a value to the immaterial heritage of dance and to the one that I dedicate more particularly to women and this since the beginning of my company. At the creation of La femme ovale, the choices I made were not all conscious, and even now they conceal a part of mystery. However, today I can see the influence that this solo has had on my determination to engage in creative processes where I never lose sight of the will to see a project through to the end, whether I like the result or not. As a woman, I realize 20 years later that many things have changed concerning our status, but the fact remains that, even if we have removed certain stumbling blocks, we still have a long way to go to achieve individual and collective emancipation.

For this re-enactment, it is as if I invited Marilyn and Lucie to my home to reveal to them what makes me palitate. Like slices of life that are superimposed on each other and that constitute the being in its existential manifesto, this re-enactment sends me back to the gyrations of this woman who manages to make room for her discomforts that inflame her as much as for her positive parts.  With hindsight and this revived memory, this solo, which I witnessed for the first time performed by two exceptional women, and this, 20 years after having created it, is not completely different from what I had imagined when it was created. To watch them take it over and subject it to their own evocative forces, to see them dress up in cumbersome ceremonial costumes while taking a route of lightening and unburdening, can only fill me with wonder. I sincerely hope that the public can in turn be as captivated as I was by this oval woman.

ARTISTIC CREDITS

Year of creation : 2003 re-enactment spring 2023
Running : 56 minutes

Choreography : Louise Bédard
Performers : Louise Bédard (2003 version), Marilyn Daoust and Lucie Vigneault (re-enactment)
Collaborators : Jean Derome, Angelo Barsetti, Anne Le Beau, Axel Morgenthaler and Simon Deraspe
Photo credits (promotion) : Angelo Barsetti