The premiere of Lecavalier’s new work, the exhilarating hour-long solo danses vagabondes at the Tanzhaus nrw in Düsseldorf in December 2024 offered so many surprising shifts and turns, centering detailed foot- and armwork and offering break-speed winks at performance and dance history. There was shape-shifting play with costume—a low-fi revision of the kimono and the track pant—and a sustained meditation on the port de bras, invoking ballet, folkloric moves and escalating into a Pete Townsend-esque, rock-and-roll arm wheel that ground out a triumphal momentum and escape into other realms. Throughout, Lecavalier worked the quad, outlining the square of the performance space and marking trajectories across it and always moving—her feet arched, working the metatarsals, the balls and even the sides of the feet, crossing and stepping in time, moving her through the space relentlessly with an illusory, hovering ease. Unforgettable is the final scene: Lecavalier front-facing, her gaze direct, arms extended and wide open, a riff perhaps on the performer’s final bow? Standing before a firey, pixelated LED sun, it was an apocalyptic image followed happily and unexpectedly with a secondary exit: this one featuring witty hand-to-head ornamentation and the promise of return.
With this premiere, the now 66-year-old is continuing her second career launched in 2006, when she created her own company Fou glorieux – a name that encapsulates the splendor and glory of her reputation in the dance world like a diamond. With So Blue (2012), followed by Battleground (2016) and Stations (2020), among others, she built in a focused and radical way on the fruits of her prior collaboration with Édouard Lock’s company La La La Human Steps between 1981 and 1999: being an artist who crosses borders with her body – and who doesn’t work on herself for the sake of training, but as a researcher on her body, which she may not believe is only capable of growing at a young age.
