Clara Furey (Canada) When Even The
May 5
MO museum
Artistic director and performer: Clara Furey
Composer and musician: Tomas Furey
When Even The is a series of ambulatory performances choreographed and performed by Clara Furey, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Arts of Montreal, inspired by Leonard Cohen’s eponymous poem. She develops an existential reflection on memory, the passage of time and death, prevailing themes of Cohen’s work.
In this work, halfway between poetry and choreography, Clara Furey starts an open dialogue with movement, plastic art, and sound designed by Tomas Furey.
She first worked alongside a sculpture by Marc Quinn, Coaxial Plank Density in Montreal and then in Vienna at the MUMOK with an artefact by Heimard Bäcker, Fundstück.
Designed as an art exhibit that can be visited or as a showcased artwork, When Even The fosters an intimate atmosphere and meeting with the audience, who can circulate freely. In a minimalist performance space, Clara Furey immerses us into a meditative dimension of movement. By inviting those present to gather around an animate body and a inanimate body that incarnates different aspect of mourning and decomposition, the performer questions the existential void in a ritual dance, which examines the porosity between life and death.
The void becomes a conveyor of possibilities and allows all forms of communications to coexist. Using Cohen’s poem like a musical score, Clara Furey’s movements spread out over the space and invite us to share an abstract narrative that fosters the careful listening of sensations and hyper-waking of the senses. The sound design by Tomas Furey brings the audience to introspect by opening up imagination spaces.
Exploring the sensuality of the dead, the living, the memory of touch, and absence through sensitive choreography, Clara Furey places a mirror in front of our perishable bodies by offering us different perceptions and different incarnations of decomposition, body and language. Different identities pass through her, inhabit her, and visit her, between tension and relaxation. The earthly body of the artist, like a vessel, connects these visible or invisible choreographic, poetic presences and soundscapes. Thereby, Clara Furey’s work brings us back to our ineluctable human condition, to our relation to existence and disappearance.
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.