Belle manière
Nicolas Cantin produces a play of damp squibs that do deliver, since he does follows through with his sad clown performance lacking all over-the-top promises or outstanding jokes. Endearing anecdote of the failed ordinary.
The announcement : “When you drop a porcelain cup / Afterwards, you try to glue together the pieces / But whatever you do / There is always a part that is missing / Do not hide behind the curtains / We are both the same / We are two fucking porcelain cups / Do you see what I’m saying or am I speaking into emptiness ?” And so the stage is set for a crappy atmosphere where sincerity and feelings have deserted to be replaced by emptiness. The worse mistake would be to try to conceal this void, to try to fill it up with everything that existed and finally aborted. But worse still, to force laughter when it would make you cry.
And as mentioned in the acknowledgements : yes “it is a pleasure to be badly lit by [you]” Frédérick Gravel. A nod to bathroom neon that sometimes procure an uneasy awakening and a difficult but oh so necessary sudden awareness to at last sidestep everyday life.
CHOREOGRAPHER Nicolas Cantin
PERFORMED BY Ashlea Watkins, Normand Marcy
LIGHT Frédérick Gravel
ARTISTIC ADVISOR Peter James
PRODUCTION Nicolas Cantin
WITH THE SUPPORT OF the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec AND Canada Council for the Arts
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Marie-Andrée Gougeon for Daniel Léveillé danse
“Endearing anecdote of the failed ordinary ... With perfect nonchalance, the performers work visually to create increasingly twisted metaphors ... This play is a true roller coaster. We climb it for a long time, we hear it creak, the landscape constantly changes and then we tumble down into all kinds of curves. We have fun and feel nauseated. Finally, we get badly beat up and it does us good.”
- DFdanse, Montreal.
“Nicolas Cantin, by instinct, develops a strange body theatre. An absurd butoh for consenting adults, a slow-motion clown. Don’t look for dance : the gesture is spare. The body is there. That’s often all. It’s sometimes enough. It’s Belle manière, a destabilizing duo, on the edge of nothingness.”
- Le Devoir, Montreal.
“Cantin is still working out his issues with women, but he undeniably does it in a theatrically compelling way. No other artist manages to get so much out of so little. You’ll be just as shaken up as that soda bottle by the time you get out of there … And maybe love is like that soda bottle; you think you’re going to get something sweet, but it’s really just an explosion waiting to happen, leaving you with nothing but a sticky mess.”
- Local Gestures, Montreal.