Compagnie Virginie Brunelle offers exquisite pain

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      A Vancouver International Dance Festival presentation. At the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on Friday, March 17. No remaining performances

      Pain, choreographer Virginie Brunelle revealed during a postshow talkback session, is “the main subject” of all of her pieces. And in the case of To the pain that lingers (À la douleur que j’ai), which received its local premiere at the Vancouver International Dance Festival last week, that pain is more specifically grief, perhaps the bluntest and most enduring of emotional injuries.

      The source of trauma is never explicitly identified, but the opening sequence might contain a clue. In it, Peter Trosztmer places himself in a simple wooden chair, while the other five members of Montreal’s Compagnie Virginie Brunelle arrange themselves around him with a certain air of formality, as if posing for a family daguerreotype. The first glimpses of pain come when the dancers gasp and stiffen as one, breaking the stillness they had initially maintained. Soon, the performers fling themselves away from Trosztmer to lie corpselike on the floor, the lights dim, and the dance proper begins.

      First up are two extraordinary duets. After a second chair appears, Claudine Hébert and Milan Panet-Gigon each take a seat—a prim and proper couple, except that their grins are too fixed, their eyes too glassy. Hébert repeatedly edges her partner out of his chair and moves it further away until the divorce is final, and the grinning turns to quiet howling. A final attempt at reconciliation is literally upended by the rest of the cast, who slowly tip the two dancers, now sharing a single chair, onto the floor.

      Trosztmer and Chi Long’s subsequent pas de deux moves even further away from the comical. He is patient and she is wild, flinging herself into increasingly violent paroxysms only to be rescued, and given a seat, at the end of each spasm. Here, madness or addiction seems the subtext: Long embodies the pain that accompanies the loss of one’s will; Trosztmer the sorrow of losing one’s love to malignant and mysterious forces.

      Further interpersonal dramas unfold, broken periodically by high-speed group calisthenics that offer a strange relief from the measured darkness. More optimistic, too, is the final scene, in which Trosztmer and Long waltz again—but with Hébert’s half-naked and seemingly inanimate body slung over his right shoulder, a literal barrier to intimacy and a metaphorical embodiment of sorrow. Eventually, Hébert slides to the floor, a strange half-smile on her lips, and the other two dance unburdened into the shadows, perhaps to find contentment.

      It would be remiss not to mention Isabelle Arcand’s misleading delicacy; she looks like an orchid but is clearly made of carbon fibre. Equally impressive and utterly different is Sophie Breton’s rock-star androgyny, which is backed by a gymnast’s strength.

      After the show, Brunelle referred to her dancers as “family”—a happier one than that shown in To the pain that lingers’s opening scene, and one that did perfect justice to her elegant choreography and theatrical sophistication.

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