Les jolies choses / The Pretty Things

Just like last year’s Festival de Otoño, Móstoles will be host to another Canadian artist, Catherine Gaudet. Last year, Robert Lepage graced us with his presence at last year’s Festiva.Gaudet will present her dance piece Les jolies choses / The Pretty Things at the Teatro de Bosque, the same stage Lepage performed on. Teatro de Bosque will once again be collaborating on a masterpiece of performance art.

It will be Gaudet’s first time in Madrid and anyone who declines to see her first performance in Madrid will miss out on the opportunity of being able to say, “I was there when Gaudet first performed in Madrid.” She is sure to leave her mark on this year’s Festival and Madrid’s arts scene. She is a rising star in dance and contemporary performance. If not now, in time, she will be known as a choreographic genius. She is not new to performance and boasts almost 20 years of experience. She presented her first choreography in 2004, making her mark over the next two years with Grosse fatigue , which was acclaimed at the Arhus International Choreography Competition in Denmark. Her work has been performed across Europe and North America. This work has been showcased in her home city Montreal, Oporto, and Lithuania and many of Europe’s top dance festivals.

There is a precious little story behind this montage that has to do with the extraordinary adaptive intelligence of human beings and how that capacity becomes art. Given this, it is easy to see why she titled the work Les jolies choses / The Pretty Things. In her choreographic writing, the body is the receiver and transmitter of invisible forces, a witness to an existential history at once personal and universal. The starting point of the choreography was the examination of connections and resonance. After the lockdowns, they could return to the studio, but they could not interact with each other like before. It was the perfect moment to get creative with how we connect with one another. Gaudet's usual team was euphoric with the reunion and full of gratitude, but they still had to keep physical distances, they could not touch each other, so they began to explore other forms of connection to reverse that distance, even trying telepathy. They were looking for a kind of spiritual contact, which translated into a rhythmic and minimalist movement, a more contemplative choreographic abstraction, a refined gesture, and a motor economy. Gaudet developed a visual dance score of simple gestures. Five bodies move to the rhythm of a metronome. The five dancers, three men and two women, come together in the centre to form a sort of revolving platform made of bodies, a collective figure where they all turn, together, but keeping their distance.

But the rigours of the pandemic were gradually being left behind and the world once again grinning with its violent face. In the same way, a seemingly simple and harmless choreography, was manifesting its intrinsic hardness, especially for the performers, mentally and physically. The performers on the edges of the spinning “machine” must double their efforts to keep the seamless fluidity of the work and the collective’s unity. A tension is generated between this common euphoria and the violent resistance of each body in pursuit of the whole, assuming that they are trapped in the machine and that at the same time they are the machine. The game becomes an obligation and is gaining pressure and there comes a time when it is necessary to decompress. It pushes open the whistling valve to release the excess vapour of salted bodies. De-pressure is the flip side of grandiosity. It is hypnotising and admirable but at the same time a suffering is felt.

In response to why she called her piece Les jolies choses / The Pretty Things, she responded: "The title refers to the friction between the collective ideals in which we project ourselves and the reality of the current artistic environment. The piece reacts to the ideal of living together in the face of the difficulty of carrying out this illusory task. When I think of this friction, the entertainment community jumps out at me. I, too, am faced with the efforts I must make to maintain my artistic identity and my own ideals. I feel a strong desire to make myself fit into the mould society has created for me to be pleasing. I feel the desire to get out of a form of complacency by cutting to the chase, even if it means running the risk of displeasing. There is a nourishing anger that animates the piece, a moment of almost adolescent revolt. Their demand for autonomy and freedom is heard". And this is precisely what you feel watching this mechanical dance that impregnates the bodies of the dancers with sweat and exhausted movements: you feel the desire for heterodoxy, the escape from the canon through a movement score that repeats itself but that, from time to time, is broken by the animal impulse, until we reach a vibrant end where we see to what extent an invisible bond has been generated between the stage and the audience, to what extent we are all part of the machine from which we cannot get out.