"Give a hand to move a mountain!

Tangente is proud to kick start an innovative project in partnership with Desjardins Caisse de la Culture and KissKissBankBank aimed at supporting artists.

Artists included in Tangente’s next season, received a training session provided by Desjardins Caisse de la Culture and Nathalie Courville, Canadian ambassador of KissKissBankBank, and who is also an expert in communications and funding in the field of culture. Each one received in-depth training in personal funding for self-employed workers and cultural organizations and how to create and manage a fundraising campaign..

The artists are entirely responsible for the planning and the management of their own fundraising campaigns and Desjardins Caisse de la Culture augments the income earned from their campaign with an additional $500 as soon as the first $1000 is raised.

By supporting this artist, you are helping significantly his artistic project and giving him the possibility to learn how to be financially independant. Thank you!" (Tangente)

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photo credit: Natasha Thomas

Summary

Les Strange strangers is my newest work, presented at Tangente from March 9-12, 2017. Les Strange strangers is a duet performed by Nathan Yaffe and myself, with an original score composed by Michel F. Côté and the lighting designed by Karine Gauthier. With such a great team of collaborators, I’m continually inspired throughout the creation process, I can’t wait to share it with everyone in March 2017!

Why we need your help

With the support of Studio 303, we began the creation Les Strange strangers this summer, and made great strides. However, to be able to continue with the next phase of development, I need to raise a little more to cover the salaries of my amazing collaborators. My fundraising goal is $2,000. To help me reach my goal, Desjardins Caisse de la Culture will donate an additional $500 as soon as the first $1000 is raised.

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Crédit photo: Natasha Thomas

About Les Strange strangers

Strange stranger proposes a singular meeting place between dance and animism – the belief that objects have a soul and affect us in the same way that human beings do in interaction. Inspired by this belief, Strange stranger aims to explore a type of relationship, both human and non-human, to the environment that surrounds us: exploring a feeling of strangeness to our environment and discovering some of its unexpected facets.

Creation process

To do that, Strange stranger uses a self-hypnosis technique that aims to achieve an altered state of consciousness making it possible to experiment a new relationship to our surroundings. Working with dancer Nathan Yaffe and the composer Michel F. Côté, I am experimenting the possibilities of altering our sensorial systems using auto-suggestions that we pre-establish in an hypnotic text (for exemple, that the objects are alive, or that we are melting objects…). In this way, we explore the idea of animism and different realities altering and dilating our senses to open a space where unexpected meanings can emerge. Strange stranger is created from material derived from these explorations. Complementing our self-hypnosis technique, we also work with a large piece of fabric that allows us to animate objects underneath and on top of it. This idea is inspired by Lewis Caroll’s tale Alice in Wonderland in which the logic of the universe surrounding Alice is reversible and paradoxical, similar to the experience of animism.

Strange stranger will invite audience and performers to reverse their sensitive relationship to their surroundings and to feel the matter around them becoming animated in order to lose their selves for a moment in this indissociability

The team

Choreography: Audrée Juteau

in collaboration with the dancer Nathan Yaffe

Dancers: Nathan Yaffe et Audrée Juteau

Composer: Michel F. Côté

Light designer: Karine Gauthier

Mentore: Ginelle Chagnon

Audrée Juteau

Montreal based dance artist Audrée Juteau has collaborated on numerous projects with independent choreographers and dance companies including: Sonya Biernath, Jordi Ventura, Dean Makarenko, Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, Bouge de là, Aurélie Pedron, Katie Ward, The Jean-Pierre Perreault Foundation, and more than 13 years with Trial and Eros directed by Deborah Dunn… Fascinated by the creative flux in encountering others and in going beyond the individual experience, her first choreographic projects were collective creations with the group The Choreographers. With her pieces Poisson and Sam affecte, she delved into a research on presence, working with a dog (Sam) and developing a singular choreographic work that led to the creation of the film My dog in a parallel universe, a collaboration with the film maker Robin Gould which was presented in première at Parrallel Live in Oslo. Audrée graduated from Ladmmi in 2003. She was the recipient of the Impulstanz Danceweb 2010 grant given by Jardin d'Europe, the David Kilburn prize (2016) and has just completed her MA at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

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Nathan Yaffe is a Montreal-based contemporary dance and video artist. Nathan’s work for stage has been presented in New York, Ottawa, and Montreal, and has collaborated with artists across Canada and the United States. the_johnsons 00:11:56, a dance-film, was shown in the Cinedans festival in Amsterdam, and in film festivals across Canada. the_johnsons 00:21:51, a video-dance installation, was presented in Montreal at the Darling Foundry, Eastern Bloc and Monument National As a performer, he earned a Helen Hayes award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role he created in Molly Maxner’s play Occupied Territories (2015).

Michel F. Côté

A storyteller and sporadic musician, Michel F Côté was born in Montreal, the year the submarine USS Nautilus made history by travelling under the North Pole’s ice cap. Since 1990, he has recorded and played with some of the most renowned musical creators in the world : Hilton Cravis III, Rev. Trevor Doldinger Jr, Béatrice "Bébé" Berlegot, and Solidman Baktouf, to name a few. His concerts and recordings have received praise locally and abroad. He is associated with the defunct collective Ambiances Magnétiques, on top of being the co-founder of the label &records. He has partnered up with Catherine Tardif as co-artistic directors for the dance company Et Marianne et Simon (6,3 évanouissements (2014), Salle de montre, bientôt, près de chez-vous). He is also dreaming up schemes with Catherine Lavoie-Marcus : together, they collaborate on the magazine esse. He keeps coming up with new tricks to trip up the bankers of this world.

Ginelle Chagnon

Ginelle Chagnon started her professional dance career in 1971 with Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. In the '80's she reached towards contemporary dance and also began to teach and play the role of rehearsal director. Collaborating in many creative processes and understanding the insider's point of view (the dancer's) as well as the outsider's perspective (the choreographer’s and the spectator’s) prepared her way to assist performers in their tasks as well as to support and assist the creative process of different choreographers, such as Jean-Pierre Perreault from1993 and Paul-André Fortier since 1996. For more than thirty years she taught contemporary technique in the professional and educational milieu in Canada and abroad. She is a part time faculty alumni of Concordia University's Contemporary Dance Department and as a board member of the Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, between 2003 and 2014, she helped define new ways of caring and understanding the legacy of Quebec’s contemporary dance repertoire as this organism was redefining its mandate into a contemporary dance institute. At the moment, she still assists performers and creators in their creative process and performance projects, she takes an active interest in documenting, conserving and promoting the contemporary dance repertoire. She is interested in sharing this dance patrimony and created workshops that promote dance and creativity for all.

Karine Gauthier

coming

Artistic approach

The heart of my work lies in finding sensorial and affective experiences, shared between the performers and audience members, that emerge unexpectedly from the alchemy of live performance. I am interested in decentralizing the will of the artist, to develop a new relationship between the artist and her creation, thus opening up new choreographic experiences.

In my last two pieces, this decentralization was facilitated by working with a dog. I was interested in the way she inhabited a choreographic world. The dog was considered as a full performer with the same power to affect the audience as his human scene partners. From the decidedly non-human relationship that the dog has with space and time, emerged new choreographic universes that were completely unexpected.

With this new creation, I am furthering this choreographic exploration by considering inanimate objects as having the power to affect. Keeping my artistic will decentralized, and through research with self-hypnosis, I am pursuing my goal to create unique and affective choreographic experiences. My work, which lies at the meeting of dance and performance, draws a lot from philosophy. I am interested in creating a somatic language and intuitive approach to the body while maintaining a critical perspective of how the work is in dialogue with its environment.

Les Strange strangers

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