DVote offers a duet of differences

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      It’s a definite case of opposites attracting. Noam Gagnon and Nova Bhattacharya don’t just live thousands of miles apart, they come from vastly different realms of dance. The French-Canadian Gagnon has always written his own rules, in both his past work with the body-smashing Holy Body Tattoo and the physical extremes of his own Vancouver-based Vision Impure. Toronto’s Nova Bhattacharya is Bengali, and came to contemporary dance from the world of classical bharata natyam, often drawing on its detailed gestures for her creations. For the show DVote at the Cultch, they bring their styles together in a duet for the first time.

      Not that creating the piece was easy. “The process was at times completely foreign to me, as it was for her, in wanting to create a connection, to create a language that would be a hybrid—to create a link between us as artists but also as characters,” explains Gagnon, speaking to the Straight from Quebec on the day before the premiere of his new work for the Ecole de Danse Contemporaine de Montréal. “A lot of it was us trying to figure out a language and finding a common ground.”

      Gagnon and Bhattacharya had known of each other for years, but it wasn’t until they met for drinks after presenting solos at the Canada Dance Festival in 2010 that they cooked up their idea of collaborating. The Shadbolt Arts Centre gave them a residency the next year to experiment.

      “It was one thing to hang out at the bar, but could we actually work together?” says Bhattacharya, speaking to the Straight over the phone from Toronto. “And so we spent a week at the Shadbolt and felt like there was a spark.”

      Where they connected, she adds, was in the fact that both draw from emotional and personal sources for their movement. But they also found their differences to be just as exciting as they continued working on the project here and back east. As Gagnon puts it, “We were like water and fire.”

      The result is a duet about two different people trying to come together as a couple—the perfect mirror to two people coming together in the studio.

      “Collaboration is a hard, hard thing and it can become similar to navigating a relationship between two people: there might be a huge burst of passion and then negotiating how you’re going to live together,” explains Bhattacharya, adding of DVote: “It’s two people struggling together against something or against each other. There’s a power struggle, desire, and longing.”

      Says Gagnon: “What they’re seeking and craving is not satisfied. There’s a constant sense of a wall between the two of them where they are attempting to reach across that world of difference.”

      Gagnon notes that this is his first duet since his fierce pairings with Dana Gingras in Holy Body Tattoo, while Bhattacharya says that she continues to “splinter”, as she calls it, the ancient art form she began with.

      “I think some will come with expectations to see see Nova and I,” says Gagnon before heading out into a hot Quebec day. “I just ask people to come with a sense of curiosity and open minds.”

      DVote is at the Cultch from Tuesday to next Saturday (May 27 to 31).

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