Puzzle Danse - Le Studio l'Agora de la danse production - co-produced with France's La Rotonde and Groupe des 20

Dance Magazine, March, 2003 by Linde Howe-Beck

Le Studio l'Agora de la danse Montreal, Quebec, Canada November 20-23, 2002 Reviewed by Linde Howe-Beck

Rules for the cross-cultural dance dialogue were simple. Four choreographers--two from Quebec and two from France--were each to make a short duo for a man and a woman. Although there was no theme, they hoped that by restricting the dancers to couples, some kind of unity would materialize. After months of working separately, they got together five days before the premiere and fit their pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle.

WITH SUCH WIDE-OPEN GUIDELINES, PUZZLE DANSE COULD HAVE GONE HORRIBLY WRONG. INSTEAD, LIKE POTLUCK SUPPERS THAT INVARIABLY BEAT THE ODDS, THE PROGRAM WAS A SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLE OF THE DELIGHTS OF LIGHTLY RESTRAINED CHANCE. Co-produced by France's Centre choregraphique, La Rotonde, and Groupe des 20 (Rhone-Alpes) along with Montreal's Studio de l'Agora de la danse, Puzzle Danse turned out to be a thoughtful hour-long evening of diversity and stimulation that included some surprising thematic undercurrents.

As the four lighting designers created moody shadows around each duo, choreographers and dancers emerged from the gloaming like witnesses, linking the disparate duets. The result was seamless. Watching it, I marveled that the puzzle pieces fit so well. Had anyone expected that these duos would expose a theme as old as life itself--the sense of isolation and loss resulting from the battle of the sexes?

Even though Puzzle Danse was a discovery of radically different styles and approaches, all but one required dancers to speak. Montreal's Helene Blackburn displayed characteristic whiplash technical attack in Petite etude sur le courage, a sketch about discord based on dancers' daily lives in which they challenged each other to the limit. This piece was later expanded into a full-length work, Courage mon amour, for her company, Cas Public (see review at www.dancemagazine.com). Blackburn's dancers voiced personal concerns as they flung themselves at each other in love-hate crises. Harold Rheaume's Morta, for his group Le Fils d'Adrien Danse, was pure dance-theater, which used relationship breakup as a metaphor for death. With agonizing slowness, his couple struggled with attraction, ambiguity, and revulsion. Would they come together or separate for good? With pain-dulled gestures and brittle, desensitized fingers, they groped toward release.

Cynicism and comedy played strongly in works by France's Francois Veyrunes and Denis Plassard. Veyrunes and his Compagnie 47/49 from Grenoble confined a man and a woman to a small space in L'Oeuf ou la poule? Defensive and prickly, they goaded each other in comic, aerobic sequences. Fighting to preserve their banality, they slammed against each other in attempts to safeguard their individuality and isolation. Their physical differences--she extremely long and thin and he compact--and their wacky but serious competitive spirits didn't answer the chicken-or-egg question posed by the title. Who came first--or last? Veyrunes made sure we'd never know.

Superficially, Plassard's Parloir was a riot--at least at first. Two rubbery, clownish bodies from his Compagnie Propos chattered a torrent of nonsense that meant nothing to anyone but the speaker. They fell and rolled, spouting gibberish and collapsing onto each other. At times when their vocal and movement rhythms coincided, they seemed to communicate. Sometimes the shapes they made with their bodies hinted that the meaning of their words was at hand. But as their antics multiplied in quantity and speed, words became irrelevant and the two engaged in a battle to the death. Despite some hilarity and occasional tenderness, Parloir reaffirmed the evening's unexpected theme of individuals condemned to isolation and loss.

Puzzle Danse's choreographers were chosen by presenters from France and Quebec for the purposes of building a touring production. The dancemakers met only twice before beginning their monthlong tour of ten French and eleven Quebec cities in early November. Their first contact in spring 2002 initiated intensive email contact. With dancers and lighting designers, they convened in the French alpine city of Albertville to complete the puzzle five days before the premiere.