Bare-Naked Soul

As the lights dim in the Grand Théâtre de Québec, several people are still searching for a seat. But the room is already full, everyone having ventured into the damp Saturday evening in Quebec City to see the latest creation by Montreal choreographer Dave St-Pierre, Un peu de tendresse, bordel de merde! (A Little Tenderness, For Crying Out Loud!). The scene is chaotic. Someone has taken the wrong seat and crawls over into the next row, landing on a spectator’s lap; a couple in search of their umbrella asks people around them to stand up; a woman apologizes profusely as she squeezes along the back row. Emerging from the crowd and taking to the stage, the dancers finally distinguish themselves from the audience. “Congratulations,” the evening’s host, Sabrina, tells the public after the show is under way. “You have just survived the first twenty minutes.”

Audiences have been happy to subject themselves to St-Pierre’s radical brand of dance theatre, and critics have only helped to strengthen its following. “One goes to see a Dave St-Pierre show as one would go to mass,” writes a journalist in the Montreal daily La Presse. Like fellow Québécois choreographers Marie Chouinard and Édouard Lock, this generation’s enfant terrible approaches such themes as gender and sexuality head on, breaking the taboos left behind by his predecessors. His raw aesthetic recalls Pina Bausch’s theatre of cruelty — European critics have hailed him as her “pornographic son” — but on St-Pierre’s stage, the tortured soul dances to Coldplay and plays dress-up. Chipping away at the icons of his art form, he has a professional stripper embodying the violin strains of Air on the G String, an obese woman dancing a solo to the leitmotif from Swan Lake, and a chorus of naked men in blond wigs standing in for the corps de ballet. A deft editor, he delivers montages as devastating and profound as they are cheeky and lowbrow. No wonder the show has the man beside me weeping one moment and laughing the next.

When I met St-Pierre an hour before the performance, he was sitting cross legged at centre stage, surrounded by dancers warming up to a bubbly Michael Jackson track. Sporting a crumpled grey hoodie, sneakers, and a green wool cap, the thirty-four-year-old reacted to his success with wide-eyed amazement. “Sometimes I wonder how we can have this much attention. We’re a dance company, not a rock band.” But the comparison is not far off. Judging from the past four years, he has a talent for creating buzz and filling seats.

Dance has always been a part of St-Pierre’s life. As a child, he escaped to the studio to forget a stubborn speech impediment, and at eighteen left his hometown of Saint-Jérôme for Montreal, to attend contemporary dance school. He was short, but made up for his height with sheer attack, his body a fearless machine easily bored by formal training. It wasn’t long before he dropped out and began working professionally. But he soon longed for more creative control. Approaching his thirtieth birthday as a sought-after dancer and moderately successful choreographer, he gave himself an ultimatum: if his next production didn’t take off, he would stick to dancing.

La pornographie des âmes (Bare Naked Souls), the predecessor to La tendresse, took four months to create. St-Pierre couldn’t afford to pay his performers — a mix of dancers and actors, some professional, some not, all of them friends — so rehearsals were a haphazard affair. “Every Monday night, I waited to see who would show up. Sometimes it was one person, other times twelve. The first time all fourteen of my performers were together was for the run-through,” he says. The show became a series of short skits put in order the day before the premiere. “We couldn’t remember the piece by heart because there were too many scenes, so we wrote a list on the wall of the theatre,” recalls Enrica Boucher, a theatre artist who performs in La porno and plays Sabrina in La tendresse. The run-down was integrated into the opening at the last minute, with the cast lining up at the front of the stage to preview all twenty-seven sections.

In April 2004, they played a six-night run to sold-out crowds in Montreal. Six months later, the newly formed troupe toured Germany, where upon returning less than a year later it won the prestigious Mouson Award in Frankfurt. La porno marked a personal and artistic departure for St-Pierre. He had first envisioned the piece as completing his “cycle of destruction,” a collection of previous works, but instead it launched his trilogy, Sociologie et autres utopies contemporaines. “I thought I was finishing a cycle, but I was actually starting a new one,” he says. He had mistaken the beginning for the end.

Chance plays an important role in St-Pierre’s work. He seeks out the spontaneous energy of improvisation, integrating mistakes and imperfections like little gems in the rough, and describes his performances as “happenings.” Every show is a risk, scary yet stimulating. “I often tell the dancers, ‘You’ve become too good. It isn’t interesting anymore,’” he says — in which case the offending section is altered an hour before the show. His creative process is more deliberate in studio, where an idea is wrung out with the help of text, props, and a pastiche of pop culture references.

Rehearsals for La tendresse were launched with the words “slap,” “crash,” “spit,” “split,” and “dash,” for example, and the dancers found their personas by imitating exaggerated poses from a 1980s Sears Roebuck catalogue, recreating the rigid forms of a blow-up doll, and miming the security briefings of a flight attendant. Nothing is too outlandish. “We always go farther than the movement that is left, to the limit of what each body can take,” says Éric Robidoux, who joined the company in 2003. “It’s like being Ozzy Osbourne in the body of a prima ballerina.”

These choreographic jam sessions have fostered a tight-knit group within the company. St-Pierre cites the artists as collaborators in the program notes, and presents each of them at the end of his shows. The respect is mutual. Shedding formal technique — and inhibitions — is an exercise in trust for the interpreters, but liberating nonetheless. “The insecurities Dave brings out in an artist are interesting,” says Boucher. “He pushes you into zones you’ve never wanted to visit, but that he knows you’re perfectly capable of entering.”

And St-Pierre doesn’t just test his performers’ boundaries. In La tendresse, the viewer is called upon as well: “This is not only about us here on stage,” Sabrina says ominously. “You would be so naive to think that you are safe.” The opening not only breaks down the fourth wall; it blows it to dust, as a gaggle of nude male dancers in blond wigs charges into the audience. “We’re too polite in the theatre,” says St-Pierre, “as if we didn’t have the right to react.”