Co-Creations and Group Pieces
Production MOMENTUM en co-diffusion avec USINE C
2004
« Laissez là, raison et rime, sautons gaiement dans l’abîme. »
“If you want me to tell you a story, I’ll tell you a story. There you have it.”
Nancy Huston, Limbes/Limbo.
Inspired by the bilingual text Limbes/Limbo by the great writer Nancy Huston, which is an homage to the work of Samuel Beckett; Nathalie Claude collaborates with dancer, choreographer and performer Lin Snelling.
They together create a dreamlike, minimalist and absurd world on wandering and loneliness. A “show for empty spaces” oscillating between dance, theatre and performance. The two performers, one francophone and an actress, the other anglophone and a dancer, embody both voices of Nancy Huston: the text becomes music, rhythm, and their bodies echo it in parallel.
Dangerously similar to the male heroes of “Waiting for Godot” (O sacrilege! Beckett refused in his lifetime that this piece ever be performed by women). They form a duo recalling Auguste and the white clown, sailing in an existential crisis of form and substance.
They utilise the stage of the Usine C theatre in all its nakedness. Exposing its inner architecture and stage techniques: moving lighting bridges, theatre drapes, scene traps that open; it becomes the scenography of this place without name, without attachments, this limbo…
Limbes/Limbo speaks to the senses of the viewer, talking about the search for “meaning”, the loss and frustrations while turning around in circles with words. Limbes/Limbo is the creation, the inner turmoil before the advent of the written-object, the show-object, the transit point where expectation is active, a nowhere land which is a place in itself, from the time it is named.
Text: Nancy Huston
Creation, direction, choreography and performance: Nathalie Claude, Lin Snelling
Assistant director: Nadine Sures
Lights: Yan Lee Chan
Music: DJ-FM (Jean-Frédéric Messier)
Costumes: Louis Hudon
Hair and make up: Angelo Barsetti
Scenic environnment and technical director: Alexandre Lemay
Coordinator: Colette Drouin
Presented at Usine C—in Montreal, January 15 to 24, 2004.
Photos © Rolline Laporte
Photos : Collection privée