Originally from France, Dominique Porte’s choreography work continues to challenge the limits of expression through the music of the body. Her company’s pieces have been presented locally and internationally, including as part of the Montreal Festival international de nouvelle danse and Prague’s 4+4+4 Days in Motion Festival. Building up a solid reputation as an intense performer, Dominique has achieved a unique and daring style. First appreciated as a virtuostic dancer (for Compagnie Marie Chouinard, William Douglas, and José Navas), from one creation to the next, she developed a movement vocabulary both fluid and angular, possessing a unique rhythm through which she explores the themes of communication, the relationship with the Other, identity, and the perception of the senses, almost always to live music. Fascinated by human nature and the human condition, Dominique’s precise, sensitive choreographic writing unleashes poetic worlds and powerful images. “My work is based on the idea that the first music is that of the body, of movement. Movement is mute thought. It is an impulse, a physical discharging that goes beyond thought and has its own logic. Putting music to a movement reveals the performer’s interiority just as it reveals the space around him/her, by coming to disrupt this silent place that vibrates in a state of equilibrium. What interests me is playing with sensory suggestion and perception from the point of view that no position, no movement constitutes a static equilibrium. My aim is to play with the precarious state of these ephemeral moments and to observe what triggers action, and the measure of control that one does or doesn’t possess with respect to the coherence of our impulses to act, seemingly in spite of ourselves. As in life, our presence, our perceptions are influenced by the meetings, circumstances, and places around us; what interests me is how presence and movement are influenced by time, space, light, encounters, and music.”
photo: Tony Chong |