O Vertigo battles with claustrophobia in La Chambre blanche

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      How intense and claustrophobic is O Vertigo’s legendary La Chambre blanche? To answer, veteran choreographer Ginette Laurin recalls the first experiments on the dilapidated white-tiled, walled-in set 20 years ago in Montreal.

      “At first we didn’t have a back door on the room and we worked on it for four hours a day. At some point I realized ”˜I have to have an exit on the set!’ ” Laurin tells the Straight, speaking from the Quebec headquarters of the company she founded back in 1984.

      Laurin originally conceived the piece as a reaction to the 1989 slaying of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique but recently reimagined it for a contemporary audience. It is an unsettling vision of confinement and loss of control that finds nine dancers running around and even up the walls in the bleak, cramped space.

      In her intense and decidedly cinematographic style, Laurin captures madness and the sense that it lurks below all of our surfaces, waiting to erupt at any second.

      “It was the centre of my research—the fact that people are very fragile mentally and how they can lose their mental balance,” she explains. “When this [the massacre] happened, it made me want to go deeper in the subject, so I worked with the idea of having people enclosed in a small space as if it were a jail or a mental hospital, or any kind of place where they restrain the people.

      “I play a lot with craziness and I tried to explore a new way of using balance. I play with pointe shoes and balance—and at that time that was quite new for a contemporary dance company.”

      Known for constantly churning out fresh new work, Laurin took pleasure in rebuilding La Chambre for new dancers. And she’s grateful O Vertigo kept its sets all these years.

      “I think it’s the most theatrical piece we’ve done, and I definitely think the set is marvellous,” says Laurin, a former gymnast who still draws on that sport’s athletic, gravity-defying moves in her choreography. “It would be difficult to do it today. There are all the marks on the floors and the walls from the other dancers—so it’s very touching for me to redo it, to revisit it, and try to touch the people as much as they were almost 20 years ago.”

      The remount offers Vancouverites a rare chance to see the company from that still-thriving dance hub across the country, which hasn’t been to town in 13 years. Ironically, O Vertigo constantly tours Europe, but because of the usual reasons—funding, population bases—it hardly ever travels across Canada.

      “There are fewer cities that present dance and fewer theatres here,” Laurin says. “We go to Europe three times a year. That’s always been a problem for Canada—we have to tour to have many shows in a year.”

      Still, after decades in the business and having raised three sons to adulthood, she's enjoying her time both on the road with her troupe and in the studio as much as ever.

      “For me the human body is a wonderful machine, and much more sophisticated than a computer can be,” she says. “I feel like I am still discovering so many things.”

      La Chambre blanche is at the Vancouver Playhouse Friday and Saturday (May 6 and 7).

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