Nine women on stage, in a kind of grand theatrical gesture where all facets of a rich and complex sisterhood are evoked. From (mostly) benevolence to abandonment, from exclusion to reconciliation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Les Veilleuses <\/em>(The Watchers), by Simon Renaud (choreography and conception) and Romain Camiolo (music), thus rose on Wednesday evening at the Bourgie Hall of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. A rare incursion of the classical music hall into the world of dance (the first? I can’t confirm it…), but a very nice success. It must be said that the Veilleuses <\/em>show is as much choreographic as it is musical. Six of the nine performers are singers in real life: Marie-Annick B\u00e9liveau, Salom\u00e9 Karam, Kathy Kennedy, Elizabeth Lima, H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Picard and Ellen Wieser. They teamed up with professional dancers Marie-H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Bellavance, Nasim Lootij and Ingrid Vallus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the dancers were not asked to sing fully, nor the singers to perform too acrobatic contortions, but the staging clearly aimed to integrate all the participants into a single community, that of these women of various sizes and builds, though not too heterogeneous. In a rather abstractly suggestive way, these women went through the hour-ish<\/em> of the show to express different states of mind and above all the means to face them together, sometimes disunited, or to share them among all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The play unfolds at a slow and measured pace. These women move in a world of mutual feeling that takes the time to express itself and be welcomed. It is the music that serves as a powerful bond for the psycho-emotional whole of the performance, supporting the visual coherence of the costumes, which are dresses of different chromatic hues related to yellow-orange-brown-ochre. The said music, all vocal (except for a pre-recorded electro drone acting as a harmonic cushion) and essentially tonal, is of course performed by the group’s singers, who act both as the emotional embodiment of each individual unit but also as a coalescence of the group relationship. Camiolo’s score is beautiful and seems to progress, at least that’s the impression I got, according to a historical chronological evolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n