All Voices, Nameless and Singular

©Dominique Bouchard
  • Choreography and performance: Emilie Morin
  • Camera et video edit: Dominique Bouchard
  • Lighting design and technical direction: Jon Cleveland
  • Sound design: Pier-Luc Lussier
  • Thesis supervision: Angélique Willkie

All Voices, Nameless and Singular is a solo performance that mixes dance and screen-based technologies, in which I interact with a live video stream of my own performance, appearing on screens of different scale.

In this piece where I play all the roles (performer, choreographer, sound, light and projection technician), I investigate the possibility to create images of myself, as an artist and a woman, distanced from the standards of the dominant visual production, by privileging an approach of qualitative transformation of the movement. The sound track, a regular pulse with dark tones, allows me to keep the tempo of a choreographic sequence orchestrated around repetition, to reach a state of exhaustion: as much the dancing body’s exhaustion, than of the images through their saturation, and of the technologies, by showing their limits. Nothing is hidden and everything is exposed on stage. The costume is reminiscent of rehearsal clothes, there are no curtains, nor decor, nor high tech: all there is to witness is the performing body and accessible digital apparatus, in an affirmed DIY aesthetic. My critical use of Skype as a performative platform articulates the affects of screen-based technologies on the dancing body, and more broadly the relation of the social body with mass technologies.

Midi-Rencontre SUR_Exposition Presentation, Hexagram in collaboration with Laboratoire Mimesis (UQÀC, École NAD), June 2021.

© Dominique Bouchard