The work was open for viewing only during the Summer Screenings 2024.
ASIDE by Marie Béland Canada (2024)
Filmed within an installation that exposes participants to an incessant flow of radio news, ASIDE reveals the dysfunctions experienced by both adolescents and elders as they navigate the differing frequencies of reality, at times overlapping, at times colliding. Each person thus becomes the blurred reflection of a pervasive desireto address others. While the original installation, RADIOMATON, explores ambient noise, ASIDE shifts thisexploration to the silent noise within us.
Director’s statement
In my choreographic work, I invite the public to perceive art and dance as systems that respond to the same rules as those governing our society, in particular those harmonizing relations between people. My works are sometimes radical and they discipline the undisciplined with precision and finesse. Their apparent carefree spirit reveals a thoughtful reflection on human nature and social issues: I address dance, spectacle and dance performances to reveal their undersides, their mechanisms and even their failings.
I question the parameters of dance: its favoured codes, the way it invests the body and the stage, its clichés and its conventions, as metaphors of the codes and habits of our social fabric. What brings us together, what do we like, how do we react and why? Questioning the art of dance becomes a pretext to construct a portrait of the human being, its beauties, its desires, its failures. How dance, by its mechanisms and its trends, reflects the beings that we are and our individual, group and societal choices. My choreographic signature combines dynamic physicality, absurd humour, popular culture and public engagement in a construction of meaning that can both unsettle and delight. My movement aesthetic preoccupations are focused more and more on gestures that go beyond form to become a conveyor of the piece’s meaning, its proposition, its conceptual expression. The performers use the human body in all of its senses to become the incarnation of an idea and its expression. They do actions rather than execute shapes.
The body is not the ends but the means. It is important that the meaning of the work emerges from the movement. I prioritize a “hybrid language”, a diversified vocabulary where movement, words and sounds overlap. My primary tool remains body movement but to go further in the transmission of my reflections to the public, I do not hesitate to mix different elements of artistic expression that are not necessary those of dance. In my propositions, the eventual spectators’ experience is at the heart of the choreographic choices. I like to assume confidence in the intelligence of the spectator and to leave them the choice –the right –to their own experience with an artwork. My relationship with the public is frank and coloured with humour. For several years now, I have shared with viewers my preoccupations about performance by using them as creative motors, either by asking about dance appreciation through a reflection on its failings (Dieu ne t’a pas créé juste pour danser, 2008), or by x-raying a show to reveal its mechanisms, its backstage actions as well as its artifices (RAYON X: a true decoy story, 2010), or by giving the spectator the liberty to reconstruct the show from visual clues with only glimpses of the body (BEHIND: une danse dont vous êtes le héros, 2010), or by questioning the influence of images and words on the mediatized. body (BLEU –VERT –ROUGE, 2013) or, finally, by questioning the performers’ quest for authenticity in learning another’s role (Révélations, 2014). For each of these creations, I worked to propose a dance that was at once accessible and intelligible, one that relies as much on the entertaining aspect of performance as on its role as a mirror/critic of society.
Bio
For the past 20 years, Marie Béland has distinguished herself through works aimed at both general and young audiences, presented in theaters, festivals, and private and public spaces in Quebec, Canada, Europe, and Africa. Drawing from our various uses of the body and the gestures that make up our daily lives, Marie organizes ordinary movement to make it danceable and complex. The stage acts as a revealer of the troubled zones of fiction, interchanging truth, falsehood, and plausibility. Her creations approach live performance as a social and aesthetic phenomenon, an opportunity to study the transformations that our ordinary bodies undergo in contact with the stage. In 2019, Marie published her master’s thesis entitled “Cartographie de la scène: les forces en jeu dans le spectacle vivant,” which seeks to question the object of performance and understand its workings. Recently, she has been exploring the medium of video with ASIDE.
Director: Marie Béland
Co Producers: Montréal Danse, MARIBÉ – SORS DE CE CORPS
Dramaturge: Kathy Casey
Editing: Mathilde Geromin
Music: Alexandre St-Onge
Director accomplice: Mathilde Geromin
With participation of: Julia Boyer, Thomas Chevalier, Magali Darche, Justine Demers, Daniel Doré, Daniel Doyon, Evelyne Fleury, Colette Fortur-Vachon, Angèle Gagnon, Colette Gingras, Danyka Joseph, Mélyna Larivée-Bélanger, Benoit Morin, Manuela Nino Bustos, Florence Nobert, Maeva Ross, Esther Judy Saint-Natus, Céline Tremblay
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
