FOLLOW YOU

Three bodies in one landscape

This is a piece in which DCD/EJ once again pursues its investigation of Being, with a choreographic script conceived for a conventional dance performance setting.

With FOLLOW YOU, DCD/EJ presents a work consisting of three simultaneous “solo” pieces. Three wholly distinct characters each develop in their own way, in non-relation with one another. The piece is a 50-minute progression for three individual archetypes having nothing in common except for their default sharing of the same spatiotemporal delimitations. The piece is danced to an original soundtrack in a neutral stage environment.

Inspired by the various themes he encountered in the Corps Rebelles exhibit during his residency at the Musée de la civilisation de Québec in November 2015, Emmanuel Jouthe’s aim is to make FOLLOW YOU an infusion of three types of bodies:

the functional body, the virtually “instrumental” body, embedded in systems of action and movement that, along with the use of artifacts, are intended to construct a sculptural/pictorial environment;
the poetic body, which exalts in movement by its form and through the line that wends through space and time. This refers to a sensation in dance that is elicited by “conventional” choreography;
the atypical body, driven by unusual physical behaviours and grounded in coherent gestures at the same time. It moves in hybrid ways, its corporality emerging both from the normative and the fantastical.

FROM QUESTIONING TO ESTABLISHING SENSE

During a performance, audience members rely on the security of their own psychic reasoning, on certain narrative touchstones that transform their experience into a personal and coherent whole. What if, as is the case with FOLLOW YOU, there were no such touchstones, or keys to connect and unlock the three solos? To preclude inner instability, what can the piece offer to the audience as support? How can individuals embrace the challenge of taking ownership of artistic connections only they can grasp? How will each person find a foothold, be it emotional or contemplative, to establish a connection with the piece and build their own interpretation?

Emmanuel Jouthe’s aim is to elicit a deeply moving experience in which the individual’s frame of reference is unconsciously put to the test. In this piece, a place is prepared for spectators to become ultimate performers in real time, to follow their innermost instincts, to establish sense in all that they are seeing.