The double life of Dominique - choreographer Dominique Dumais

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Spring, 1998 by Robert Hoshowsky

Dancer is embarking on a career in choreography

There is more to dancer Dominique Dumais than meets the eye. Widely recognized for her roles in ballets like The Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, and Coppelia, Dumais is fast becoming one of Canada's foremost choreographers. Dumais' love of dance began long before she attended the National Ballet School in Toronto; the youngest of four sisters growing up in Lac St. Jean, Quebec, Dominique would invent dances and perform them in her parents' basement.

Now a Second Soloist with The National Ballet of Canada, Dumais has received critical acclaim for good reason. An elegant dancer with long limbs, dark hair, and huge eyes, Dumais looks as though she stepped from the canvas of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. In person, she is articulate and strikingly beautiful, and discusses her love of dance and choreography with a depth that far exceeds her 30 years.

"I never consciously got into choreography," she says. "I had a desire to express other things, and I kept thinking I'd be able to find that purely with my dancing. I realized it wasn't enough, and so I started to choreograph, not at all thinking I would necessarily have a career in it."

After taking choreographic workshops through The National Ballet of Canada, Dumais created Sometimes She leaves you there in 1993. Since then she has created pieces featured at other venues, including the Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists (fFIDA), and the Toronto Dancers for Life AIDS benefit.

Her latest work, The Weight of Absence, premiered at Toronto's Hummingbird Centre this May, along with Washington square and Desir, two pieces choreographed by James Kudelka, Artistic Director for The National Ballet of Canada. kudelka is a source of inspiration to Dumais and she has danced in a number of his works, including the world premieres of The Four Seasons, The Nutcracker, and The Actress. Like Dumais, Kudelka joined The National Ballet of Canada as a dancer; later, he became a full-time choreographer. James is incredibly respectful," says Dumais. "He's a choreographer, and he knows how the mind is when you're creating. For me, I'm very vulnerable, and he wanted to give me space, and do what I needed to do." One of Kudelka's suggestions to Dumais was to use more dancers in The Weight of Absence than in her earlier works. At 30 minutes, the piece uses the talents of nine dancers, and is her most adventurous dance to date.

"It all started with movement," explains Dumais. "Part of the creation was to have the experience of exploring movement with my colleagues, dancers that I know very well. Also, the challenge was to be able to address a large venue such as the Hummingbird Centre, while still keeping the integrity of my work, which is, up to date, quite intimate."

For The Weight of Absence, Dumais once again collaborated with Eric Cadesky for the music, the two having worked on other pieces, including after Lucy.... and do moments of Her dissolve? Dumais' electronic partner is a video camera, which she trains on the dancers while creating a new work. She says taping the dancers helps her gain perspective. "It's kind of like sculpting. I do a little bit, then I go home and look at it."

One word frequently used to describe Dumais and her choreography is maturity. It is not an unexpected comment, since much of her work deals with loss.

"People say to me, 'Your work is really emotional' or 'very interesting in structure,' but I don't see any of that. I just do what I think is right for my work. in fact, I'm even surprised when people say it's emotional, because when I'm in the studio, I don't talk about emotions. I don't say to the dancers, 'OK, here's a painful moment.' We purely talk about the movement and dynamics and kinetic flow. The body is packed with so much complexity that I think if we are true to the source of the movement, something else happens."

Like a great actor being able to speak volumes through the eyes, dancers in Dumais' pieces convey a great deal through their bodies. For anyone who has seen her earlier work Tides of Mind, it is simply impossible not to be swept to the brink of tears.

Premiering in Israel with dancers Karen Kain and Robert Conn in 1996, Tides of Mind is a stark pas de deux set against the living memory of The Holocaust. With that serving as the basis for the piece, Dumais used Karen Kain's years of experience to their highest advantage.

"The first inspiration was Karen," says Dumais. "I thought, 'How can I explore with her all of her strengths as a woman, as a performer, as an artist?' I narrowed in on the aspect of loss, and Karen's strength and maturity. At this point in her career, the kind of experience and maturity she has is rare in classical dance."

Although her work to date has received rave reviews, Dumais prefers to live in the moment, and feels her future comes from what is happening right now. "If I am really alive in each part of my process as a human being and as a choreographer, I'm going to be looking for the opportunities and situations that are appropriate to my development at the time. I'm constantly thinking of the next thing, never some huge plan."