Catherine Gaudet & Daniel Lévéille Danse Featured in 92Y Harkness Dance Festival Week 2

The 92Y Harkness Dance Festival's all-international 2020 season continues Week 2 with Montreal's Daniel Lévéille Danse, with Catherine Gaudet, choreographer. Interested in subtle shifts in the body and micro-movements that reveal hidden sensations, Gaudet combines raw, precise corporeality, dramatic tension, obsessiveness, and the grotesque in this arresting new work for the company of five.

Gaudet focuses on cycles as a universal structure and to give them tangible shape, she uses the circular form- spatial, internal, instinctual...- as a backdrop. More geometric and refined, these postures nonetheless convey a profoundly human experience very much attuned to the other.

About Catherine Gaudet
Catherine Gaudet is interested by the body's subtle transformations occasioned by the ambiguity that underlies our existence. She approaches her choreographic work as a study on the unconscious and elusive aspect of human being, hoping to reveal that which it seeks to conceal. She develops a physicality whereby the body becomes a place of resonance for complex and contradictory sensations percolating beneath the surface. Her choreographic language is interwoven with subtle changes in muscular tension revealing overlapping states, ideas and impulses. 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 raw aspect of bodily states coalesces with the precision of the lines and evolves in step with a finely woven choreographic score. The dancers performing her works are strongly engaged, rising to the challenge presented by a precise control of form, combined with its deconstruction through open performative states.

Runtime: 55 minutes (no intermission)
This performance contains nudity.

Photo: Mathieu Doyon

Coming up at the Harkness Dance Festival

HOPE HUNT AND LAZARUS AND THE BIRDS OF PARADISE
Oona Doherty (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Joss Carter, DJ
Fri, Mar 6, 8 pm; Sat, Mar 7, 4 and 8 pm, from $35
"...intelligent, raw and meticulously detailed performance, full of sharp body language...this stunning solo...potent, impressionistic dance-theatre treatment of what she, Oona Doherty, refers to as 'the male disadvantaged stereotype.' It's riveting and moving, and she's a simply phenomenal performer." - *****Donald Hutera The Times, Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Fearless Northern Ireland choreographer Oona Doherty performs, in Hope Hunt and Lazarus and the Birds of Paradise, a brash and nearly violent solo that channels the men who inhabit her world of strife and division. Oona arrives to the theater by car, thumping with House music through rolled-down windows, and emerges full-flung from the 'boot' onto the street and into the audience where she performs amongst the onlookers. Accompanied by staggering sound, Oona then leads the audience through the lobby and up the stairs to the performance space, where she performs this aspirational portrait that mixes physical and sociological theatricality, the urban dance alphabet, and neoclassical ballet memories with an aspiration to the sacred.

Runtime: 40 minutes (no intermission) followed by a 30-minute DJ set
https://www.92y.org/event/hdf-hope-hunt-and-lazarus-and-the-birds-of-paradise

GOOD RHYTHM WONDERFUL LIFE
Kazu Kumagai (Sendai, Japan)
Fri, Mar 13, 8 pm; Sat, Mar 24, 4 and 8 pm, from $35
Kumagai "... channels dissonance and passion, taking tap to a stormy place beyond the familiar sunshine." (Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Tap dance catalyst Kazu Kumagai animates the field with his distinctive and dynamic improvisatory presence, waking up the senses with delight and groove. "Tap is a language. When I go to Europe, I don't speak to the audience, but they can understand. When I went to Senegal, we could communicate." Communication is all in the tap, and alongside his live band, Kumagai taps his way, with astounding skill and musicality, to the rhapsodic urgency of swing.

Runtime: 70 minutes (no intermission) live music
https://www.92y.org/event/hdf-good-rhythm-wonderful-life

A PALO SECO
Sara Cano (Madrid, Spain)
Fri, Mar 20, 8 pm; Sat, Mar 21, 4 and 8 pm, from $35
Blending flamenco tradition, Spanish folklore, Japanese butoh, Israeli folk dance rikudim and contemporary dance, Sara Cano is both shaping and advancing the flamenco dance form. With her commanding stage presence, brilliant technique and atypical approach to tradition, Cano mesmerizes audiences with dances that go beyond convention and into the transformational.

This performance is part of the well-loved and lauded annual Flamenco Festival 20/20 produced by Miguel Marin.

About A Palo Seco
Cano translates renowned Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno's approach to experimentation - his search for an ever-deeper reality by dancing from the soul - into the simmering multi-award winning A Palo Seco. As Cano is profoundly influenced by the work of Ohno, Ohno was profoundly influenced, in 1926, by the great flamenco dancer, La Argentina. Set to a penetrating soundscape by Spanish composer Héctor González, A Palo Seco, charts Cano's personal evolution toward the future without losing the grasp of tradition.

Runtime: 60 minutes (no intermission)
https://www.92y.org/event/hdf-a-palo-seco