Dance Me
It is said that music (musicality) helps the quality of the dancer’s movement on the stage. It helps the dancer to facilitate and access new ideas in movements on stage. It adds an additional language in order to enrich vocabulary. It is said that music helps individual phrasing and dynamics within the context of the choreography. The results have been applied not only in composition, dance performance, and music education in general-Robitaille’s, but also in understanding brain plasticity within a larger context. There must be a strong connection between auditory and motor processes and listening to and dancing to music aka performing music in the context of music imaginable. To understand the versatile processes during artistic stimuli, such as music in order to dance, it is, according to several scientific studies, necessary to study with continuous naturalistic stimuli.
In order to picture the massive cognitive and affective stimulative effects that music may have on dance, I am mentioning to you a ballet performance called Dance Me, based on Leonard Cohen’s music by the world-class- , outstanding ballet company from Canada, Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal (www.bjmdanse.ca/en/) led by an artistic director Mr. Louis Robitaille. The piece was the actual last artistic involvement of the late Coen because he died just before the ballet production was finished. In the conversation with Mr.Robitaille, I am finding out that he knew immediately what he wanted to do. Robitaille is a former dance star of a big dance company Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. He has run Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal since 1998. The company made a big effort to secure Cohen’s permission before he died, as well as to handle the rights to his music. Dance Me is the biggest project in the company’s 46-year history. Today, the entirety of Canada, especially Cohen’s birth city of Montreal is celebrating him. Leonard Cohen had no time to see a Finnish product at the end because he died in 2016, but had enough time to follow most of the artistic process during the development of this piece. Robitaille’s own vision for the dance project should be about the music, and it should be more than a string of his old-time hits.
This project endeavor cost $500,000 to make and took 3 years to bring to the end—including six intensely focused months of creation. “Unfortunately, one morning in 2016 we were informed that Mr.Cohen died in his sleep. We were very emotionally involved and wanted to do something not only exceptional but something right for Mr. Cohen and, of course, when he passed away the pressure and the stress was bigger. Our goal was to reach that canonical, that greatness of Leonard Cohen. The entirety of Montreal celebrated his life. There were people on the street gathering in regards to honoring Leonard Cohen, ” Robitaille said. “It was our luck that his last album [You Want It Darker] and songs went darker, and music critics considered it a masterpiece. We use three songs from that album, so we really use songs from the beginning, from 1967 to the very last one.” Robitaille says.
The entire show is about how Cohen understood love, and video projections in the production evoke grand cycles of the seasons, aiming to color the mortality that Cohen so often wrote about before he died. The company BMJ is hiring the most well -known contemporary choreographers in the world, and it also has the best dancers. For instance, Greek-born Andonis Foniadakis in the production took a physically demanding approach, in order to achieve a true meaning of Cohen’s lyrics, Colombian-born Annabelle Lopez Ochoa put a more lyrical flow to the movement, while Turkish-born, Ihsan Rustem choreographed “Dance Me to the End of Love” as a series of revolving romantic duets between a male soloist and different women who then abandon him. Dance Me must be a remarkable creation inspired by the profound work of legendary musician Leonard Cohen. It is a piece approved by Cohen during his lifetime and is an homage to the great Canadian poet-singer-songwriter that evokes a life cycle of human existence, very well described in Cohen’s reflective music. Surrounded by a team of celebrated designers, Dance Me is a great combination of scenic, visual, musical, dramaturgical, and choreographic polls in order to pay tribute to an excellent quality of music.
Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal already toured with this production in the U.S. The company is going to make another production featuring music history, this time featuring remarkable American musician Nina Simone. This brand new production will have not too many dancers on the stage and will be developed under the special circumstances and the rules due to a Coronavirus outbreak. Hmm, looking forward to that!
Dance Me production by Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal will be touring in some parts of Europe, including Serbia (Eastern Europe), 11th and 12th of April 2022, Novi Sad, at 19. Belgrade Dance Festival (www.belgradedancefestival.com).
Marvelous!