Louise Lecavalier and the four elements

Louise Lecavalier lifted men, she flew through the air, she appeared to make the ground bounce, the floor a trampoline, projecting us all into space alongside her. She was punk, she was muscled, she was a he.

Wearing sneakers, black tutu, spray-painted spandex, bleached hair flying, her dancing challenged received categories and generated a charge that drew international audiences and comparisons to historical icons like Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan. The story could have ended there, perhaps, in fame as an endpoint or else in the slow fades or heroic departures, whether due to injury or the short-sighted demands of a field that often privileges youth over experience.

Except no. Never. At 66, Lecavalier is still making dance new, and none of it is for the faint of heart: physically demanding, durationally intense, and raising a fist to the status quo and the expectations of the field. Why make dance? How, and for whom? As the field turns to notions of “conceptual dance” and critiques of technique, Lecavalier continues to follow her own path: to move and move differently.

In December 2024, at Tanzhaus NRW in Düsseldorf and then at HELLERAU in Dresden, she returns with a new production, danses vagabondes, her fourth and latest choreography for her Montreal-based production company Fou glorieux, a demonstration of her radical expressivity, inspired by the uncodified and the vernacular, and an unparalleled performance commitment.

The turn to authorship was never guaranteed—a first choreography made in 1981, Non Non Non je ne suis pas Mary Poppins, did not leave her wanting more; and, meanwhile, the chance to work with La La La Human Steps drew her deeply into a performance career. Yet becoming a choreographer since the early 2010s has allowed for a remarkable expansion and, yes, extension of her career, with movement designed from and for her own interest, schedule and abilities, as well as offering a kind of scale of production that, after years of being part of giant multi-media projects led by La La La, has allowed her to develop her own vision and put it out there independently.

In works like So Blue (2012), Milles batailles (2016) and Stations (2020), and in collaborations like Delusional World (2023) with media artist Lu Yang, the throughline of Lecavalier’s career remains: vigorous, uncodified dancing wherein the generation of movement challenges our perception of the contours of the body more and more. But how did she get here?

Air (Off-axis)

To look back at her time with La La La Human Steps is to remember the DIY energy of Montreal circa the 1980s; that is, a city in the thralls of de-industrialization, moving towards the neo-liberal economy yet not fully entrenched. A city full of empty warehouses, hopping clubs, cheap rents and the cultural energy of independence politics.

With Édouard Lock at the helm, the company forged by the unique collection of people in La La La Human Steps made dance unbound by disciplinary lines and the habits of theatrical dance, rehearsing long hours to build a new movement vocabulary and performing in clubs and galleries in the city, where dance hadn’t typically played before.

With its unusual combination of raucous athleticism and attention to the non-verbal gestural vocabulary of the arms and hands; with its use of montage and media effects as structuring principals, La La La Human Steps offered a new vision of what dance could be and Louise Lecavalier was at the centre.

Formed in tight collaboration with Édouard Lock and performers Louis Guillemette, Michel Lemieux and Myriam Moutillet, and later with Marc Béland and Claude Godin, the company went on to influence a generation of artists, including Wim Vandekeybus and the Flemish New Wave. Lecavalier’s contribution began with a striking athleticism and musculature that, whereas in the past the dancer’s body aimed to mask the physique that would evidence any form of effort or labour, allowed her to perform spectacular, airborne jumps, referred to within the company as off-axis. That revision of the body en aire—acrobatic, self-propelled, and returning to the ground—would, among other things, wow audiences and defy patterns of gender roles as they operated within western theatrical dance circa the 1980s.

The remaking of the pirouette into the barrel jump is perhaps her most iconic contribution, forged collectively in the early days but pushed to the limit by Lecavalier’s athletic abilities, small size and dedication to rehearsal time—an uncommon work ethic that, by all accounts, could at times be over the top. Critics shifted uncomfortably back then, wondering if this was in fact dance; and worrying about what they saw as potential masochism.

Lecavalier, however, has always insisted on the agency and control afforded by training and technique. At a recent talk in Montreal, Lecavalier shook her head at perceptions of the work’s risk. “I’m not so daring, really. In life I have things that scare me way more than the dance…like violence and…war. But when you train so much and you are so loose, you don’t land so hard and, anyway, I was always falling from my own height….”

Discourse proliferated around the dance, circulated through a robust fandom as well as in myriad press accounts and within academia. Critics speculated on its intersection with feminism and wondered if her powerhouse moves were “good” for women, or simply too extreme, another model of embodied perfection? Through it all, the company and Lecavalier kept dancing, nudging against received values and the rigid binaries of choreographer/dancer, artist/muse, man/woman. Risk was not an end in itself but rather a search for what could be, a desire for a portraiture of the expansive body. That desire holds true today. Speaking recently about her approach to choreography, Lecavalier said: “We think we know our bodies, that we know them onstage, but we don’t know them so well. If everything you make is so recognizable, it lets us keep in this conviction that we know exactly what we are, that the body is just that and it’s not more complex than that. I think that we are broader than that, there are not so many limitations with the body.”

It’s like recalling a scene from a Wim Wenders’ film from the period, in The Course Of Time, a heightened moment of perception on the train:

“I remember as a young dancer thinking, movement pours out of me. It’s not just that I’m making something in the space and it stops here at the end of my body or that it finishes with me here ((pointing to the limits of her hands)). I was thinking, ‘It must go bigger than that.’ I remember I was in the subway, thinking maybe there’s no separation between another person and me, maybe it’s just my simple way of seeing things that lets me assume this: that we are separated, and air is nothing. But air is something. And it connects us. So I wanted always to do that, dancers love to do that: expand the body, expand the body…and me I wanted to find another body, a different body.”

Earth (we can be heroes)

A pivotal turn for Lecavalier’s work came soon after leaving La La La Human Steps. After giving birth to twins—her daughters Romy and Jeanne, now college students in their twenties—she returned to dance with a new energy and focus. Lecavalier attributes that in part to a newfound joy she felt at being with her daughters, as well as a new sense of efficiency, made mandatory amid the time commitments of parenting young children.

In the early 2000s, she worked with a range of choreographers including Crystal Pite, Nigel Charnock and, perhaps most significantly, Benoît Lachambre. Her collaborations with Lachambre formed a pivotal step in her turn to choreography, working on the pieces I is memory (2005) and Is You Me (2008). The works feature Lachambre’s signature attention to the full body as an expressive tool as well as his openness to quirky, highly individualized movement.

For example, Is You Me saw Lecavalier and Lachambre dancing together in low-key sports attire, track pants and hoodies, the latter tied tightly around the head as if to play with notions of masking identity. The gestural vocabulary was small: micro-gestures, bumps and twitches, odd configurations and shapes. I remember too a detailed choreography for the face, wherein Lecavalier’s sudden silent gasp and shriek-like open mouth offered a smackdown to contemporary dance’s typically deadpan pose. Perhaps more than anything else, their work together involved a style of creative partnership that demanded Lecavalier rely more deeply on her own self to generate material. Of the shift, she recalls,

„Because I had worked in the past with someone who was such a specific craft and talent, Édouard Lock, I knew I couldn’t go in this direction. I thought, I must find another way to create and I found it by improvising.“

In developing the solo with Lachambre, she remembers aiming for the strangeness of real bodies—that is, bodies outside their habits and norms yet nonetheless material and earthbound.

„As viewers, I think we want a surprise, we always want to see ourselves differently…and I think it’s good to see ourselves differently, to expand our imagination and the sense of what can be. With I is Memory, I wanted to come from the earth—that was a bit of the idea behind it. It was not the memory of me when I was young, it was the memory of the earth, of beings or animals….“

You might say defamiliarization is the core value, except that would belie Lecavalier’s mode of inquiry, which is far-less goal oriented than such language would imply. Through trial and error, and extensive time in the studio, Lecavalier has developed a new vocabulary emphasizing ground, rather than air.

It’s a vocabulary that involves detailed floorwork, driven by repetition and marked by distortion, inversion, even illusion. I’m thinking here of So Blue’s unforgettable sustained shoulder stand, wherein her legs reached upwards, reaching, bending, pointing and leaning—was it five minutes? Ten minutes? I don’t know. The image is held and drawn out until suddenly her legs became arms, feet became faces and the contours of the body once more drawn anew.

If western theatrical dance forms have historically sought illusions that mask effort—here I’m indebted to scholarship by Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko and Felicia McCarren—Lecavalier’s dancing today works durationally, using time and repetition as a device to reveal detail, elaborate form and mark human effort. Illusion here functions to show a body at the limit, familiar yet possibly unknowable.

Water (in which dancing is a gerund)

All dancers work hard to arrive at a place of ease in performance, and Louise Lecavalier may be exemplary here. Across many interviews, Lecavalier and her colleagues testify to the seriousness and consistency of her approach in the studio. The work ethic is legendary, but it is driven by the research rather than sweat equity for sweat’s sake. That is, Lecavalier’s motivation continues to be the drive to know more about dancing and what a body can do, in a field wherein the mutability of the body as an instrument is at once threat and opportunity. Describing her pre-show nerves more as energy rather than fear, she says, “I rehearse a lot before I go on stage. I know the work and so I can take a few chances with the work because it’s so much in my body, I’m kinda free with it in some ways.”

From one angle, technique, and the labour to find and maintain it, can be problematic—think, for example, of the history of ballet as an imposed technique, created by western colonial powers, at once hierarchical and disciplining. Lecavalier remembers resisting the frameworks of this world as a young performer:

„Before La La La, when I was just starting out, the routine of it bothered me: you rehearse for two hours and then you have your lunch and then you do the next thing. It was all pre-set…all this didn’t fit with me. We were under the direction of someone else, who organized classes [and the day] for us…it was like we were little kids. It didn’t work, we had to find our discourse…and find our way.”

Drawn to the artworld and the interdisciplinary mix of artists at the innovative Montreal company Groupe Nouvelle Aire during the 1970s, institutional structures and both the protocols and trappings of the dance world were less important for Lecavalier than dancing as a way of knowing and unknowing—a mode of discovery, a way of life.

That focus is still there today, where her primary work involves independent research in and through dancing: most days, Louise Lecavalier takes a class of some sort, trains to keep up her strength and stamina, and spends time in the studio dancing. She works closely with her longtime rehearsal director Françe Bruyère. That daily effort models technique as acquired skill—consider her continuing speed of execution and precision in finding shapes—and space of exploration. It’s a reminder that crafting art and ideas takes time, no small statement as we shift towards AI and the outsourcing of thought as practice. Work matters, surely a factor in her performance presence and approach to choreography. She says:

„When you push yourself to your limits, intelligent limits, you win something from this. You gain something, or maybe it’s to regain something…because I go back to the studio every day and nothing is acquired. It’s not like I’ve done it and it’s finished. It’s never finished, I have to do it again.“

For Louise Lecavalier, dancing remains a question mark—a space of inquiry, balanced between material history and material capacities to do and the transgressive mutability of bodies in motion, losing some things, gaining others. If her dancing is like water, the simile refers equally to the hard-earned fluidity of her movement and her acceptance of transformation and change as the norm.

„I spend a lot of time thinking, and sometimes not thinking is thinking…I just go for a walk and ideas come…When I make a new piece, I’ve learned not to stress myself, to be too ordinate. I live in the chaos and I accept the chaos, my life is chaos and it’s a great chaos. And the choreography comes from that chaos–but I do put in some hours there. Physical hours, in the studio.“

Fire (she is burning)

Today, Louise Lecavalier is at the top of her game and enjoying herself, taking the time she wants to build new work and balancing her own projects with frequent collaborations that offer respite from her own choreographic work as well as fresh vantage points as a performer. Her greatest fear is to have to cancel a show:

„That’s really the thing I hate the most, it’s the hardest pressure to live with because you promise something when you say ‘I’m going to do a show’… I’s a promise you make to the people that booked you, and booked their year…they didn’t book somebody else because of you…. So I don’t want to disappoint anyone, I don’t want to disappoint the technical crew, I really can’t live with that….Working by myself, it’s cheap, I don’t cost a lot, and I don’t want big money from the government. If anything happens, the impact will be minimal.“

Her awareness of the contingent body surely resonates for all dancers, as it does for us fans, watching quietly in the dark. To look at, with or without judgement, and consider at once the strength and fragility of the dancing body remains the form’s most powerful gift. Amid a perilous, war-torn world, as digital realms dilate and the Metasphere and Instagram seem to hold more sway than lives lived, Lecavalier returns us to a profound place: that of the live body, its energy offered up fully and completely, unorganized by familiar polemics or capitalist logics.

Lecavalier’s choreographic turn is, in some ways, a model of 21st century scale: compact production values, intimate solos or duets, micro-gestures, minor gestures, uncodified gestures. Her path today feels sustainable, a cultural mirror perhaps of the needs of the day. Yet if the scale is modest, the energy is big. Since her inaugural work So Blue, she has typically made rigorous 60-minute-long dances, performing herself, or together with a partner, in what are astonishing feats of kinesthetic energy, surprising movement and sharp gestural detail. It’s exciting to see an artist still searching, beyond the early years, when resistance is expected and rebellion is the norm. What stays most in my mind, though, is the thrill of her dancing. Dancing as a give-away, pure expenditure and critical message. What does it mean to be alive, the work seems to ask? And what does it mean to go at life this hard?

„I like to play with the extremities but…I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not violent, but neither am I this little girl… We’re big inside, we’re big with many stories, with many fears, many hopes, and a dance has to reflect that for me. Each time I go in the studio, it’s with fire. Even if I want to dance air, it’s with fire.”