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Photo: Olivier Arseneault

Les Rigoles

Music and dance

/ creation in progress

LES RIGOLES (The Cascades) is a new interdisciplinary performance project created in collaboration with Sarah Bronsard (dance).

Arising from our desire to stage an exploration of vulnerability, femininity and the sacred, this project found its anchor-point in the phenomenon of laughter: a powerful tool for challenging our vulnerability and questioning our relationship with the other. We explore the impact that laughter has on our bodily selves, our non-bodily selves and our collective being.

Uncontrollable laughter is connected with a process that’s essentially “feminine”: hidden, intimate, linked to the interior of the body. The invisible channels brought into play when we laugh are also those of song, and of female sexual energy – itself inseparable from a receptive and open spirituality, deeply rooted in the body.

From the point of view of intercorporeality, the contagious nature of laughter puts us not only in a common space of “letting-go,” but also into immediate physical relation with the other laughing bodies. As such, the audience’s presence becomes a central performative and dramaturgical challenge explored in this project: how do we share the sonic space with the audience, and how do we manage and modulate the energy released by our laughter? Laughter happens involuntarily, uncontrolled by us; likewise, it can just as well not happen. It is therefore directly linked to the question of failure and lack: what happens if the very material we want to work with isn’t there? What if nobody laughs? The subversive and contagious potential of laughter is one of the keys that unlocks the question of our vulnerability, itself intrinsically linked to the presence of those around us.

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« Smart, well led, funny... a discerning piece. »

STÉPHANE LABBÉ (Executive Director & International Projects Curator at TANGENTE DANSE)

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WITH

Alexandra Templier and Sarah Bronsard | artistic direction, choreography, singing

Stéphanie Fromentin | artistic advisor

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PARTNERS

2024