Cédric Andrieux,
on at The Dance Centre through Sunday as part of the PuSh Festival, is the
latest in the series of dance portraits that Jérôme Bel (whose The Show Must Go On launched the 2010
PuSh Festival) has created in collaboration with and focusing on the lives of preeminent
dancers working across a range of styles and techniques: Véronique Doisneau, a
member of the corps de ballet of the Paris Opéra Ballet; Isabel Torres, prima
ballerina of the Teatro Municpal do Rio de Janeiro; Pichet Kluchun, a Thai
classical dance artist; Lutz Förster, longtime member of Pina Bausch’s
Tanztheater Wuppertal; and Andrieux, a contemporary dancer who for eight
rigorous years danced under the recumbent but watchful eye of Merce Cunningham.
Combining dance excerpts with autobiographical storytelling, these works, in
Bel’s words, “mark the place where the life of an individual intersects the
history of dance.” Part of that temporal marking comes from the use of first
person address to the audience, speech in this instance stripping away dance’s
conceit of technical virtuosity by contextualizing the time and labour that go
into choreographed movement’s “timeless” execution, and in the process
revealing the person behind the dancer.
And, in that respect alone, Andrieux is utterly charming.
Walking onstage in sweats and toting a gym bag, he proceeds to tell us how, as
a boy growing up in Brest, he fell in love with dance while watching the
television series Fame. Encouraged by
his mother, a fan of contemporary dance, Andrieux soon enrolls in the local
dance studio, where he is immediately told that, given his body and meager
talents, his prospects are not great, but that the experience will be good for
his “development.” This is the first instance of Andrieux defying his critics,
and soon he auditions for and is accepted into the Conservatoire in Paris,
eventually graduating at the top of his class, and demonstrating for us the
solo by Philippe Tréhet, Nuit Fragile,
that he performed for his exam. All of this is told to us in a voice at once deadpan,
brutally self-honest, and utterly sincere, with Andrieux communicating his
deeply felt love of dance, but also acknowledging his own technical
limitations. Not to mention the additional off-stage exigencies of the dancer’s
life, which include moving to New York for love and, once accepted into
Cunningham’s company, dealing with the daily tedium of maestro Merce’s
unvarying routine of warm-up exercises.
The sections dealing with Cunningham form the core of
Andrieux’s narrative, and open up an amazing insider perspective on one of the
giants of modern dance, including what it meant to take direction from an
octogenarian who composed his works on a computer and barked instructions from
a chair, the humiliation of wearing Cunningham’s trademark unitards, and the
music that was always an afterthought for choreographer and performers, but
that caused Andrieux’s grandmother, watching and listening in the audience,
such physical and emotional distress. In recalling this seminal period of his
career, Andrieux makes it clear that he has the utmost respect and admiration
for Cunningham as an artist. But he also lets us know—and, indeed, demonstrates
for us physically in excerpts from Biped
and Suite for 5—that much of Cunningham’s
movement was next to impossible to perform, and extremely taxing on the body.
Which makes all the more joyful the conclusion to the
evening, when, back in France with new boyfriend Douglas, Andrieux conveys the
sense of liberation he felt in dancing works by Trisha Brown and Bel as part of
the repertoire of the Lyon Opera Ballet, as well as the chance meeting with Bel
on a train that led to their collaboration on this piece, and to the credo that
forms its heart: to move without judgment.
Added bonus: following tonight's performance, I get to lead a talkback with the artist.
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