Clara Furey (Canada) Dog Rising
May 3
Arts Printing House, Black Hall
Concept and artistic direction: Clara Furey
Choreographed by: Clara Furey, In Association With Be Heintzman Hope, Brian Mendez, Winnie Ho
Performed by: Baco Lepage-Acosta, Be Heintzman Hope, Brian Mendez
Musical composition: Tomas Furey
Technical director and lighting design: Karine Gauthier
With its celestial bodies launched into orbit, vibrating in a lustful and hypnotic ritual, Dog Rising mirrors the life cycle, the dynamic flow of matter.
From primitive impulses to gestures that are at times sexual, at times mechanical, Clara Furey’s new creation comes together like a polyphony of pulsating bodies, in turns dissonant and in unison. The choreographer pursues her exploration of physical phenomena, initiated with Cosmic Love. She turns her attention to the way sound vibrations penetrate the bones, the way our skeletons absorb shocks, and listens closely to the presence of the body as it fully manifests itself.
On stage with Winnie Ho and Be Heintzman Hope, Furey erects an architecture of pleasure. The trio is inhabited and nourished by empathy and acute attention to the energy of the body and to others. Through their tireless movement work, tensions are released in the endless repetition of cyclical gestures. Dog Rising invites us to embark on an extreme journey, a mesmerising, haunting, and penetrating spiral. It is an invitation to grow and regenerate physical strength through shocks and discomfort sublimated into joy, with a musical score by her loyal collaborator Tomas Furey.
After completing musical training at the Conservatoire de Paris, Clara Furey launched her career as a singer-songwriter.
She later trained as a dancer at the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal and worked with choreographers such as George Stamos, Damien Jalet, and Benoît Lachambre. An artist accustomed to collaborative work (Untied Tales with Peter Jasko, showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2016, Ciguë with Éric Arnal Burtschy), Furey created her first solo work as artistic director in 2017 with Cosmic Love, a collective piece with minimal gestures, exploring the voids and invisibilities in the interactions between body, song, and space.
As both a choreographer and a performer, Furey is interested in shifting codes within various forms of art by way of an interdisciplinary dialogue. In 2017, she performed When Even
The 90 times alongside a sculpture by Marc Quinn as part of the Leonard Cohen exhibit at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. She is the choreographer of Rather a Ditch (2019), a solo piece written for Céline Bonnier centring on the permeability of bodies, as a response to Steve Reich’s album Different Trains.
Her works toured in numerous festivals including the Biennale of Venise, Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques in Paris, the Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, ImPulsTanz in Vienna,
Performance Mix in New-York City and in different countries such as Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Azerbaïdjan and Bulgaria.
With Dog Rising, Furey concludes her exploration of tension and immobility, freeing previously contained energies in a performance focusing on the notions of velocity and the unfolding of bodies in space.