The Alchemists- Helen Simard
Photo from Helen Simard’s creation When Your Baby Dies
ERIN:
Ok, so I’m going to hide self-view here because I gesture so wildly that my brain thinks it is a bird in the house and I get distracted. Just as a recap here, what I’m wanting to explore with this series, both for the readers and for my own practice, is how storytelling can be conceived of as both collaborative and interdisciplinary. I thought of you for the work you do at the intersection between dance and theatre and your connection of words to choreography. The interplay between words and choreography and how dance might be like crafting a sentence, you know?
So I’m going to start with a very big question. I want to ask you: Why do you create?
HELEN:
Yeah, I mean, you know the simple answer is because I’ve tried not to, and I can’t stop.
I think I’m somebody who needs space where I’m able to address questions or experiences or concerns that come up in everyday life that can’t be addressed in everyday life. When we create shows or when we write, no matter what our mode of creation is, what you’re doing is you’re inventing a new universe where the rules are different, so things that can’t be done in the life of the day-to-day can be touched upon, or examined, or sometimes solved for yourself through creation.
We’re playing, we’re making up the rules, so it’s like: Why can’t there be a space with no gravity on Earth? Why can’t everything be backwards? Why can’t time slow down? Why can’t we have space for complex emotions that we’re not allowed to express in everyday interactions?
We often talk about art as being this mirror to society.
I actually think it goes beyond that. I think art is the space where we can imagine the world being otherwise, and if we’re able to imagine it, then we can take steps towards it. And so when it seems impossible to, you know, solve any sort of global crisis… Maybe it’s in the art space that we can imagine and we can find space and time to start reflecting on those questions, giving ourselves agency to move forward.
It’s this compulsive need. I have stopped creating. I have stopped and I’ve tried to stop.
I’ve tried to say this is a ridiculous thing you do with your life that you should stop doing.
You know we’ve had two years of pandemic where I’ve watched so many people change gears, and I have so much respect for them for being able to do that, but I’m
not able to do it because I have these questions, and this is the only space where I can begin to attempt at answering or exploring them.
Photo: Do Phan Hoi
Featuring: Victoria Mackenzie, Nindi Banks, Mecdy Jean-Pierre
ERIN:
Yeah, that really resonates with me. I feel very…I really loved what you said about going past art as a mirror of society. Art as being a space for reimagining, or a kind of revisioning. To me, that is connected to a form of magic; a transformation occurs in this. There is something otherworldly that can happen in creation spaces. Verbal communication in everyday life can only take us so far, and we are so reliant on words and on verbal modes of communication. There is so much dominance there. In so many institutions and different contexts involved in art-making and in education, you have to explain everything you think in words or in writing and then you have to verbally defend it. So it’s interesting… It’s interesting to think about communication happening non-verbally, which leads me to my next question: When you think of writing and storytelling, what spaces open up for you between language, word, and the physical body?
HELEN:
I think of dance as a very abstract art form that is so open to interpretation.
The body has so many levels of interpretation and as soon as you start to try
to concretely tell a story, dance language takes over. As soon as something becomes linear storytelling in a format where, there’s an introduction, there’s a protagonist, and there’s some sort of conflict and resolution—I find that that doesn’t work in the space and language dance gives permission to.
I have used text in my shows for about the past ten years pretty consistently, but the game that I like to play with language is actually to use words until they stop making sense. Words are so dominant. They are like an imperial force. They are colonizers of thought. As soon as you put words in a dance show, that is what audiences latch onto. The words dictate what the show is about. So when I write, I try to write in a more poetic way, or I write in an abstract or nonsensical way so that the words stop meaning something so concrete.
Once the words get separated from their meaning, we open ourselves up to a multiplicity of meanings and we start questioning the reality of words. Are these really powerful symbols? We know what a chair is. We know what a dog is. We know what “once upon a time” means, but if you can repeat that long enough, or you know, disrupt, or
disorient the order of words or the way that we receive words, then I find that your mind goes into a more effective pre-verbal, empathetic, and visceral space. You start understanding what you’re witnessing and what you’re hearing in different ways.
I think, for me, the pleasure of playing with language that way does come from the fact of being bilingual, because when you spend most of your life constantly translating and not understanding completely what’s going on, sometimes at this point in my life in both languages, even though English is my first language… It’s this idea of allowing yourself to misunderstand or not, to understand or get lost in your understanding.
So I’m like: Well, why can’t this be a mechanism we use to allow people to let go of a concrete grasp of reality and fall into a more poetic understanding of what they’re witnessing? So I feel like the relationship between words and the body, it’s a difficult and a delicate one because I don’t want the words to dominate. I’m always trying to come up with strategies either through a bombardment of meaning or a repetition of words, or through a deformation of sentences to the point where it no longer makes sense. It’s about letting go of that need to understand concretely or intellectually, and to open ourselves up to other modes of understanding that resonate in the body. It’s a very difficult one, and it’s a very delicate one because the words do want to dominate.
ERIN:
So much of what you’re saying relates to a dream space. The potency and absurdity of a dream space. I know you’re doing a project connected to dreaming and lucid dreaming.
I am thinking about the mode of creation for this. You know, are you recording a vocal transcript of dreams, or a written one? I am thinking about dreams as a means to understand language and meaning in a logic-adjacent way.
It’s interesting what you were saying about bilingualism as well. Obviously the English language is rooted in histories of colonization and oppression. The language has so many power dynamics embedded in it, and it is also connected to a kind of brevity—it can oftentimes be a business language. I think of Twitter with this. Reducing language to sound bites or arguments. Ambiguity as a sign of weakness. I think about this with leadership as well. You can’t ever show ambiguity as a leader, right? You need to know, know, know all of the time. It’s interesting to think about the relationship between gender, power, and language here.
I realize gender, power, and language are obsessions of mine. So with this I want to ask you: Do you have symbols, or questions that you see recurring in your work? Things you keep circling around. Things that reappear. What are some of these questions you keep asking yourself?
HELEN:
I mean I truly believe I’ve only ever made one show, and I’ve just made it over and over again and in different forms. The show has existed for 2000 years and is already present and I’m just trying to access it. It reveals itself to me in different ways. So every iteration through my body of work is just the same show. It’s a show about the chaotic journey through despair towards hope.
It’s this question about the complexity and the chaos of navigating unstable spaces and trying to find balance in spaces that are continuously shifting. It’s about trying to access the perspective of moving towards hope…moving towards something other… I won’t say something better, but I will say something other. How do we move through these spaces of complexity? Of trauma? Of oppression? Of societal injustice? How do we work through our own strangeness? Whether or not that’s forward or backwards, or you know, transversely across time. I would say that that is my giant meta theme.
More specifically, definitely I think my work touches on gender in a way that I don’t know is intentional. Gender is often addressed for me through an affirmation of challenging norms, allowing space for bodies to behave in ways that they are sometimes not allowed to behave in greater Western society, and in the history of Western society. I was just reading about masculinity and the history and construction of it. How our Western notion of masculinity is tied to colonialism and global violence. So, just thinking about the ways bodies, in greater society, but specifically in dance, in literature and in storytelling…how bodies have been presented over time.
Photo: Do Phan Hoi
Featuring: Victoria Mackenzie, Nindi Banks
I often think there’s a space of rawness that is not expressed or allowed for female bodies, or female-labelled or -presenting bodies. There’s a rage and a rawness that is not allowed, and then maybe an empathy, or a sensitivity, or compassion that male bodies have not been allowed. So I think the way gender operates in my work, is like, it’s like more of a blurring or a messing of the expectations of: Who is a caregiver? Who is powerful? Who is an aggressor? What does powerful look like? Is it always strength, or is powerful sometimes softness or submission? These are questions I try to look at without being prescriptive or telling people what to think. In my casting, over and over, you will definitely see women behaving badly. I am wanting to create spaces where even the spectator is confronted with their own blind spots or preconceived notions with regards to societal norms, gender norms, or whatever is deemed an acceptable behaviour.
I think there’s definitely something in my work that is confronting. It asks that the spectator be an active participant in the experience, and then there’s also lots of care in the process. I think a lot about care if we’re asking the spectator to witness difficult things or be a part of a difficult experience. How can we take care of them, and hold their hand, and re-engage in consent throughout the spectator experience?
This is something I think about a lot when it comes to the piece I’m working on right now. When Your Baby Dies, which is a piece about miscarriage and infant loss. It’s a very heavy topic and it’s brutal work. How do we make space in brutal work for people to have the permission to be like, I can’t handle this right now? I can’t be here. And to have that be ok.
Another reason, I think I create, besides all the more metaphysical stuff we talked about at the beginning, is basically to connect with other humans. I think that when we make a show, it’s not a one way relationship. I’m putting something on the stage that no longer belongs to me. It belongs to the performers, and it belongs to the spectators, and it belongs to a collective imagination. I have been thinking about that when it comes to questioning the codes of traditional Western modes of spectatorship. How can we think of other ways of witnessing, and watching, and being together, and dreaming and connecting in these magical spaces?
On a surface level, another obsession I had was with flashlights. I went through a phase where all of my shows had flashlights. Maybe it was an obsession with shadows. My shows delight in a kind of excessive overstimulation of the senses, whether that is intense lighting or music, or too loud texts that are nonsensical. Like when you lose track of meaning completely—thinking of overstimulation as a way to get people out of rational linear thought and into spaces of the pre-verbal, or the preconscious.
ERIN:
It’s like a consciousness powerwash!
HELEN:
Yeah, exactly! I give everyone earplugs at my shows most of the time, so if it’s too loud for you, you can put them in. I don’t want it to hurt. As a spectator though, it gets to a point where you have to give up and let go. You have to stop trying to understand and just let it wash over you. For my show, Idiot, there was this point where it was so intense that there would always be someone who would walk out of the show. Every night. It’s like… If you have waited thirty seconds longer you’d see where we were going, but I get it if you can’t. Yeah, maybe I make work that’s not for everybody.
ERIN:
I think it’s crucial to make work that’s not for everybody. Art doesn’t exist to appease people. You’re making it to unhook some metaphysical question or block in yourself, or in the world, or possibly in your ancestral line. To me art is more than like: I want to give someone a pleasant and diverting experience, I mean there is space in arts ecologies for that too, but I do think it is important to do something other than please or distract through art-making. In life there are moments that are unpleasant. Arts ecologies can, and should have, the space to connect to difficult or confronting subject matter or else it’s all a monolith.
HELEN:
Speaking of art and definitions…labels…forms, it’s interesting because I am working on a text that could be read like a script, but through work with PWM and other workshopping I did, there are some discussions like…the point isn’t to tell a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. There are multiple points of entry and multiple interpretations. I do feel that what I am doing is not theatre. Maybe it has some of the same intentions as theatre, but even with my writing, it is very choreographic. As I am writing this text, it feels choreographic, or like a score, as opposed to being what I understand is a conventional form of theatrical presentation. I have a lot of respect for those forms, but I don’t feel like what I am doing is that.
ERIN:
Right, well, and I mean that was another core reason why I wanted to speak with you. Sometimes I find the labels of dance, theatre, music, and even interdisciplinary arts as well, I find them helpful in some ways, and also wholly unhelpful as well, because I think a story can exist in so many different forms. I think a story can be a collection of associative fragments. I don’t think it needs to convey linear meaning, or have an arc, or a structure that is Aristotelian. I mean the Aristotelian arc looks a lot like the male orgasm, right? And it’s like, why are so many of our stories structured this way? Where is the space for imagining other modes of knowing, and other systems of exchange?
People are so accustomed to words being organized in a certain way. A story looks like this ..I mean sometimes I feel people are much more militant about writing than they can be about other disciplines. People have a roadmap for stories told through words, be it through learning about Greek tragedies in school, watching Netflix, or even having to write essays in school. People latch onto words as you said. A chair is for sitting. We always try to attach stringent clarity to the written word. Analyzing and analyzing instead of possibly receiving writing in a more dream-like or subconscious way. It’s interesting to think of a conversation, you know? A conversation is fluid. It doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end. What are some other tools? I want to know more about other tools for structuring story. I am searching for that in these interviews with people whose practice I admire. There is reverence for convention or tradition, of course. But there is also this interest in other modes of inquiry or development when it comes to story.
HELEN:
I like what you said about the ubiquity of a linear beginning, middle, and end story.
We get fed that so much through TV, film, and the media. We are bombarded with these structures, so they start to become “natural”. We take them for granted. I think about this with contemporary dance. Part of the permission we have in this art form—to undo, or look at, other modes of story construction—is that the audience can oftentimes have a lack of awareness around the art form. So that is a fertile terrain right now, at least in contemporary dance practice. I think there is a beautiful permission to continuously disrupt the object, or disrupt the way we do things.
I also think about the fact that dance as a discipline is inherently collaborative. It’s an art form that can only be created with other people in the room, from generating movement, to structuring a piece, to working with lighting and music.
Then, of course, there is the need for it to be witnessed because it’s ephemeral. A word I like to use is porosity. Collaboration allows the piece to be porous and malleable and to have membranes that can be penetrated to make space for different ways of doing and thinking. Different multiplicities of interpretation.
I mean, how often do you drag a friend to a contemporary dance show and they’re like: “I didn’t understand anything”. I think that there was a real push at a certain point in dance history to have the notion that dance is a language and that it is telling you
something. But maybe you didn’t understand, and maybe that’s okay. But did you feel, Did you dream? Did you imagine? Did you sense? Did you become aware that you were very tense all of a sudden, and you didn’t know why?
At the beginning, you were talking about the disciplinary divisions and how they can be limiting, and at the same time I think that for me there’s been something really important in my practice about rigorously defending my discipline. What I do is dance. Or at least choreography first of all. That is my training. If I write a text, or work with musicians, or if I do a photo series, I think of it in a choreographic way. The way the words fall on the page is as important as what the words say.
I think there is something that’s been really liberating for me in my own practice, which is to not worry about falling into the codes of other disciplines because I radically insist that even if it’s a text, it’s not a poem, and it’s not a script. It’s choreographic. In writing, there’s this notion of: Where’s the reveal? What information is being revealed? What is the climax? How are we going to resolve this? The discovery for me is that I don’t have to address those questions because it’s not what I’m doing. I’m doing something else.
ERIN:
This makes me think of a light and a lighting gel. It’s a metaphor I think of a lot. Practice and training and discipline as a gel that colours and informs your own perspective or lens. Your lens or light is your personhood—the way you interpret and interact with and respond to the world in a storied way… With that in mind, I would love to hear a bit more about your process of creation. What could a choreographic approach to creation or writing look like for you? Can you speak to this?
HELEN:
I can only speak, I suppose, to my own approach, because many people choreograph in different ways. My approach is that I see phases in my work. There’s a real research phase where I still don’t know what I am looking for. I start by trying to know the question I am asking. Maybe it’s a placeholder question. It might not be the right question, but it’s where I’m going to start. Then there’s a lot of space, in my movement practice, a lot of time spent improvising and exploring that concept through the body. There’s theoretical research that goes into it too. I read a lot. This feeds my reflections and the reflections of what I’m dancing. I think this reading transforms and makes the body move in a different way.
So there’s a lot of space—time and space—spent in this place that I’ve started calling the cloud of unknowing. It’s like: We don’t know what we’re looking for, we’re just looking. Bodily states. Improv scores. I go back and look at the questions that keep coming in and coming up. It’s like: So if I put this idea before this idea or after this idea, how does that inform the way we read the ideas and how they come together?
Then I make choices and I just live with them. By the time you’re performing it and the performers are in a state of doing, there’s this strange back and forth in unknowing.
The challenge when I transfer that process into writing, and I’ll speak specifically to When Your Baby Dies, because that is the current writing process. Part of the research is from my own experience of infant loss. I had six miscarriages in a period of two years and I felt a need to look at that experience. When I started writing, I felt this pressure or a questioning from people around me asking: What is the story about? What are you trying to say? How does this get resolved? I was like: I think the point is that it doesn’t get resolved. There is no resolution, and I am not alone in the process.
I didn’t want it to be about my experience exclusively, so I interviewed about a dozen people about their experiences and I took those interviews and transcribed and deformed them and invented new narratives. I combined stories and omitted facts. I inserted myself into some of the stories and experimented with autofiction, or other people’s narratives in order to get to this space where…I wanted to feel like the story was expanding. Like time was expanding in the story too.
ERIN:
That goes back to the notion of understanding or meaning as being like a feeling in your shoulder or jaw. A wash of attention. That the translation of meaning doesn’t have to be: Oh, I know exactly what this is about.
HELEN:
And that’s where it has been fascinating to look at the difficulty in the way I create the script. Every time I keep working on it, a strange new form emerges. It’s absurd. I wonder sometimes about the oscillation or relationship between the choreographic approach where the body fills in the meaning, and an approach connected to more concrete or more linear thinking about narrative. Then I ask myself: Why is the concrete narrative important? Is it only that it’s important because I keep getting asked about it? Is it important to the work? Is it important to me? Are those my questions? Are those just questions of expectations? Western society’s notion of what a story looks like?
Then I can permit myself to not meet those expectations. In permitting myself to do that, I think the questions that come up are then about: Where do I present this? How do I present this, if I put this in a theatre and ask everybody to sit down for ninety minutes, and because of the space, everyone is expecting the work to fit into a frame that offers a clean resolution or clear meaning-making. What are the other spaces we could put this in that would permit us to undo the need to constantly storify? How do we undo the need to constantly storify?
ERIN:
I am thinking of a gallery space here. The way you negotiate space in a gallery is immersive. There are different expectations of beginning, middle, and end. People negotiate space and narrative differently than in a theatre.
HELEN:
Absolutely, it’s interesting the baggage a space can hold, and how you can both provoke and be generous with your audience.
ERIN:
That is a challenging tension. I think of the little Google Street View guy, you know? You can’t just drop him into Barcelona or into the middle of the ocean. He needs some floaties or something. Something to help navigate.
HELEN:
Yes, there’s a responsibility to a creator to think about: Where am I dropping the little guy? Maybe it’s a silly analogy, but if you go to an Italian restaurant it’s because you want Italian food, so if they give you French it’s not because it’s French that it’s bad, it’s because you went for Italian and they gave you the wrong meal. You know what I mean? It’s interesting to think about your audience and the codes you’re working with. If you’re in too much provocation, or if you’re kind of shattering everything then sometimes people disconnect or they don’t care.
Like, what are the breadcrumbs you leave for them to follow you? A work needs to be framed properly. Sometimes if I don’t like a performance, it’s not because I don’t like the work. There’s usually something about the way it’s being presented. I feel I don’t have the agency to understand or interpret as a spectator.
ERIN:
This makes me think of generosity and care. Experimentation comes up here too, which takes me back to gender and power. Ha, obsessions!
I am very interested in seeing women experimenting, like really experimenting, because we’re often not given the space to try and fail to the same extent that men are. I am really interested in that experimentation and the permission to not make sense. Simultaneously, I have also felt disconnected and alienated from contemporary or experimental works. I mean, I always come in with an open mind and heart, but sometimes the translation or connection isn’t there for me. I personally think it comes down to work needing more development time, but I’m not sure. It can sometimes feel like what I am witnessing is insular—the outcome of a residency that I don’t understand. I think art-making can be made in a context where it doesn’t need to be shared, but if my work is being shared I want to understand why. There is something in the translation and exchange. Sharing practice, I don’t know.
HELEN:
It’s interesting…we watch differently in a rehearsal because the convention is different, the agreement or the contract you’ve taken as a spectator when you watch someone’s rehearsal is different than the one when you sit in a formalized space, and so I kind of realized, why don’t we have more of these end of residency showings that allow for a kind of experimental, messy, vulnerable space that people are invited into. They’re coming to watch process. It’s almost made me question the need for a big final finished product.
ERIN:
This reminds me of play readings or readings in general. I’m able to feel a connection to the artist because I’m involved in their process of developing something. There’s a collaboration there, so your expectations and engagements shift. I wonder about how some of that generosity might get transposed into the bodies of those watching a final production or reading a final work? Cultural product sometimes seems to have so much more weight than exchange or collaboration.
HELEN:
Critics are involved in this too. This evaluative container. It’s like: I paid for this and so I want to get my money’s worth. I’m interested by the audience–performer contract at a musical performance or concert. It’s like: The musicians are doing a show and the spectators are there to watch them, not only because they love the music, but because they have a whole imaginary relationship with the band. A connection. You might see your favourite band several times and one night they are terrific, and the next they’re not, but you still love them. You’re invested in a different way.
I wonder what mechanisms we would need in other forms of the performing arts in order to create that connection with audiences. I mean, how do we create spaces for people to become part of the flow of the process and engage in the work beyond that final product that we just consume?
ERIN:
Yeah, that makes me feel like tight in my chest.
Well, it’s interesting to think too, when you think of buying old CDs, there would be lyrics in there and maybe a personal note, then you’d listen to the whole album. I find reading like that. It’s deeply personal, and yet you don’t even directly interact with the author but you get to see their mind move. You get to collaborate with the questions and themes in their book. It feels deliciously intimate—like there’s some imaginary psychic line between author and reader. That does feel outside of capitalism to me. Especially because, for the most part, books are pretty inexpensive to buy too or you can get them from a library. I remember OFFTA sent these messages in the mail to promote their work and they felt like correspondence more than promotions. It was interesting… How can we think of artful or intimate ways to promote work as well?
HELEN:
And the flipside of that is like: How can this intimacy happen without artists being expected to give up their own privacy and intimacy? This can so often be a demand with social media. I have a job that requires me to be very public, social, and outgoing. Coming home used to be a very private space, but now it feels like we have an obligation to share in the privacy of our own homes as well. This expectation of constant availability. I am not at all anti-social media, but it feels necessary to have boundaries between yourself and the work.
The work I make comes from personal places, but it belongs to the world. It was fascinating, when Papillon got cancelled three days before the premiere in 2020 because of COVID restrictions, we kept working. We wanted to respect the artist’s contracts, so we ended up performing the show. We did eight shows to an empty venue. We told everyone, through social media, through communications, that we were performing even though there was no audience. So many people reached out to me and told me how much that meant to them. It helped them to imagine the show in a way.
(It should be noted that Papillon finally premiered at Mainline Theatre in fall 2022 and I went to see it. It was an achingly human and unique work with a live music score and such tender and complex human exchanges and relationships).
It made me think about the books you haven’t read, that people have told you about, or the movies you haven’t seen, that people have told you about. The musicians you’ve never seen live, but you’ve listened to their CD. You have these relationships created through an imagination of the art, not through the art itself.
ERIN:
Another question I have been asking everyone is: How do you take care of yourself when you’re writing and making work around personal or difficult subject matter or themes?
HELEN:
I mean, we often take better care of other people than we do of ourselves, or we realize the care we need through taking care of others. One of my favourite things, on top of getting to work on my own practice, is being a rehearsal director or doing dance dramaturgy. You learn to be a better creator because you see the problems or solutions in somebody else’s work so much more clearly than in your own.
In the When your Baby Dies process, it has been important for me from the very beginning that I have some true distance from myself and my story. It is not about me or my story. It is a story that is complex and that has a lot of beginnings and endings. When I first started working, I was trying to tell my story, then I realized that the thing that had been so difficult about the experience of having multiple miscarriages was the loneliness I experienced.
Grief is a nebulous place for society. We don’t deal with it well, and we don’t understand it well. When you have a secret grief, an imaginary grief…because it’s not a concrete thing. When you lose a dream. You know, that is the way miscarriages work. Eventually you stop telling people what you’re going through and there’s a real isolation that happens in that.
So I felt that, in only talking about my experience, I was isolating myself again. There needed to be a multiplicity of voices. So there’s a distance. It’s not me.
When we’re talking about the difficult work, we’re not talking about difficult things that happened to me. In that distance, something opens up. Situations happen differently, but in a similar way. One of these stories gets told in the play. It is about someone's experience of going to the hospital and being dismissed and being sent home and almost bleeding to death and coming back to Emergency.
This is not my story, but it is a story that four different women told me. It’s not about trauma porn or pulling off our own scabs. That doesn’t interest me. It’s about finding a universality in the specific. If the work becomes about grief—the blurry space between nostalgia and regret, and letting go of imagined futures. Those are all topics people can connect to. Yeah, actually, I think for spectators, it creates a space of watching that allows them to live their emotions.
ERIN:
You speak so beautifully about your practice as being deeply collaborative. Can you speak to a specific moment of collaboration that opened up something in you that would not have been possible alone?
HELEN:
I was in a collective for twelve years. That was the first part of my career. I was in an all female street dance collective. We created devised works. This completely informed the way I create today. I have to be clear about that with interdisciplinary collaborators who don’t come from dance. I’m often trying to get them to work in new ways that can be challenging.
I collaborate quite a lot with my husband, Roger White, who is a composer, but also with other musicians. Like in my show Requiem Pop ,I worked on a process where we decided to start with music instead of dance first. We had a music creation residency, and I was directing musicians. We would make these improvised scores together. Every twenty minutes I would give the three musicians new prompts on cards.
Requiem Pop was a part of my Iggy Pop trilogy, so they were all references about his music. You’d get these three different prompts and just have to play for twenty minutes. I don’t play music. I only played the recorder, in grade four, you know?
It is the strangeness of things you would never do that interests me. I was thinking about music as a gesture more than a song. Thinking in a choreographic way. Roger said, those are never the choices I would make from a musical perspective, but they were the right choices for the work..
So I think for me, collaboration is always most successful when we put ourselves aside for the service of the work and listen to what the work is telling us.
ABOUT HELEN
Helen Simard is a choreographer, rehearsal director, and dance dramaturge. Originally from Kingston, Ontario, she relocated to Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal in 1996 to pursue a career in the arts. Simard collaborates with musicians and dancers to create visceral interdisciplinary shows. Her work uses repetition, complex spatial patterns, and techniques of sensory overwhelm to create hypnotic, dreamlike performances that blur the boundaries between conscious and subconscious spaces. Past works such as NO FUN (2014), IDIOT (2017), Dance Side of the Moon (2018), REQUIEM POP (2019), and Papillon (2020) are joyfully chaotic and complex in their simplicity, walking a fine line between the real and the imaginary. Simard holds a BFA (Concordia University, 2000) and MA in Dance (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2014). Her current research explores themes relating to loss, memory, nostalgia, and intergenerational exchange.