Pascaline Knight, Mariana Lafrance and Julie Lassonde present an evening of performances called “Viens” at Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario Feb. 16.
For their first collaborative performance exploring the theme Nouvel-Ontario (Northern Ontario), the three women question the notion of welcoming and the conditions that foster its success or present challenges.
Having a house with wide open doors. Inhabiting your own body to be open to others. Being yourself, firmly standing on your own two feet. Welcoming supposes equilibrium between the individual and the collective, security and experimentation, risk and goodwill.
Above all, it requires the freedom to consent to encountering the unknown.
Time, language and ego are structures that mask the immediacy of the body. The performances of these three artists reaffirm the notion of body awareness as the primal and founding place from which conscience and speech emerge.
The here and the now might not be what they should be, but freeing gesture and language from their familiar mediators allows us to imagine other modes of togetherness.
Through a number of absurd or poetic gestures, individually or as a group, the three artists launch a conversation inspired by the childhood of persons and peoples to reveal the aspirations of a thriving francophone community.
This artist residency project is part of the Place des Arts’ “Projet Manifeste.”
The evening of performances starts at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 16. A reception with the artists takes place at GNO the next day, Sunday, Feb. 17, starting at 11 a.m.
Visit GNO's website for more information.
