Grand Poney - ON/OFF
ON/OFF
Artist Showcase
Dance
National Arts Centre
Tuesday, 2 December
3:30pm
Grand Poney is an interdisciplinary company established in Montreal by founder Jacques Poulin-Denis in 2009. The company devises a hybrid and collaborative process based on choreographic abstraction, musical composition and theatrical dramaturgy. It draws its narrative from the infinite traits of the human existence: our physical and psychic states, our impulses and principles and our relationship to others and to ourselves. Grand Poney consistently utilizes a measure of unfeasibility to bridge the imaginary to the obvious.
ON/OFF
ON / OFF is a dance work designed for teenagers and adults where five dancers perform on an unusual and wondrous machine: an oversized treadmill. On this rolling and confined surface, movement is restrained and ecstatic, exhilarated and acrobatic. At times in group or alone, the performers address the themes of identity, self-fulfillment, determination, coexistence, freedom, exhaustion and the unending feelings and sensations that makeup the complexity of life.
The treadmill is a meeting place where the characters seek to understand their place in the world. Sometimes at its mercy, sometimes in control of this intriguing, unpredictable and mobilizing machine, the dancers play with time. They suspend actions in space in order to dig out the details of gestures, questions and interactions. The machine becomes a metaphor for the passage from childhood to adulthood. It is the path that we choose to travel and the life that we learn to tame.