Daniel Léveillé Danse presents La pudeur des icebergs
October 2 & 3 @ Premiere Dance Theatre
By Leandra de Valois-Franklin
Last weekend’s dance menu offered a feast of buttocks, bollocks, chests, breasts, and all the rest as Montreal-based Daniel Léveillé Danse opened the new season of Harbourfront Centre’s DanceWorks series with the Toronto premiere of La pudeur des icebergs. Translated as ‘the modesty of icebergs,’ this compelling work, premiered in 2004, completes Léveillé’s trilogy of works, which includes Utopie (1998) and Amour, acide et noix (2001). Inspired by an encounter with a young junkie, this piece aligns the bodily risks taken by the drug user with those of a dancer in a highly physical display of six immaculately sculpted physiques.
The five male and single female dancers, presented in the nude, appear both vulnerable and venerable without peripherals and social identities. They gaze outwardly and towards one another with blank expressions as they dispassionately enter and exit the space. Musculature and breathing is visible as they perform ritualistic movement composed of deep lunges and squats (leaving nothing to the imagination) as well as giant leaps and turns after which the icicle-like bodies crash to the ground. The repetition and emphasis of symbolic gestures encourage visceral and emotional responses from the audience.
The dancers rarely make physical contact with one another, occasionally using each other as platforms from which or onto which to jump. Red marks become noticeable on the dancers’ skin, exposing the normally invisible violence inherent in dance. The sexual allusions of moments of intimate contact are not meant to titillate. The occasional nipple tweaking, bum clutching, and back petting appear at first superfluous, but their lack of eroticism serve to iterate the unselfconsciousness of the independent yet open creatures on stage. At one point, the bare-assed dancers pile atop of one another, creating an asexual iceberg formation highlighted by Marc Parent’s subtle lighting design.
The title suggests the innocence and fragility associated with icebergs, although the work never attempts to comment on obvious issues relating to icebergs such as global warming. The meaning of the display is not meant to be deciphered, and the audience is instead encouraged to witness the beauty of the “pure form and stark essence” of the minimalist choreography. This includes slowed moments at what has been described as a “glacial pace.” No-frills set design and lighting strip the standard sensory-overload environment of the stage to its bare essentials, while Chopin’s Preludes Opus 28 plays unassumingly in the background.
With a career spanning three decades, Léveillé has patiently honed the skills required to powerfully convey the expressiveness of minimalist movement. La pudeur des icebergs chips away at the endless layers of human experience. At just an hour in length, the visually evocative work is deeply penetrating, revealing more than just the tip of the iceberg.
