Snakeskins performers engage gut and skin | Photo Vancouver International Dance Festival

This year, the Vancouver International Dance Festival invited the Par B.L.eux dance company to present its renowned show Snakeskins. The show is a way for the public to realize that watching dance is like learning a new language, where the relationship with the outside world changes.

Created in 1998, the Vancouver International Dance Festival aims to promote cultural diversity and all expressions of contemporary dance including those from European and North American origins.

The movement influenced by the environment

“We look for artists that focus on the body as the vehicle for communication. We like artists who push themselves to the limit of their physical expression. We like artists who sweat, who transcend themselves in their effort to say who they are,” explains festival co-creator Jay Hirabayashi.

Benoît Lachambre is one of these artists. Dance has always been driving his life.

“My first memory in life is a dance one. I was only 18 months,” he says.

Later in his life, around his teenage years, Lachambre explains that this body language helped him to get more confidence. He began learning new techniques with the Ballets Jazz de Montréal and discovered the kinesthetic approach of his art. This approach of movement and gesture can change through the environment around you.

“The senses awake and link the artistic and the somatic part. Skin becomes porous and malleable, almost like when you are under a drug, just by listening to your body,” he says.

In 1996, Lachambre created his own company Par B.L.eux in Montréal : “B.L.” for Benoit Lachambre, and “eux” for “them,” the creative artists he collaborates with. Two of his collaborators, dancer Daniele Albanese and multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe, will accompany Lachambre on stage for the Snakeskins performance at the Roundhouse Centre.

A poetic communication with the viewer

With Snakeskins, Lachambre opens himself up as never before, making his own skin a surface of experience. The surprising result has been a long-term effort.

“It took me years of theory preparation to imagine Snakeskins, with a big somatic work,” Lachambre says .

The piece is the result of his meeting with Amélia Itcush, a Saskatchewan pioneer dancer who died in 2011, and her work on the dispersal of the weight in the body.

“There is a lot of exercise on the ground, where you undulate your body and every organ slackens, almost like a water snake,” says Lachambre.

If it seems difficult at first to understand it, don’t worry, Hirabayashi says. Audiences will soon feel the emotions being conveyed by the dancers’ bodies in their own.

“It is like poetic communication where words are metaphoric for a plethora of meanings. The physical exertion has an emotional impact that resonates with the experiences of the audience and they feel the meaning of the movements without the need for words,” Hirabayashi says.

The relationship between the audience and dancer is key.

“To survive as a dance artist, you have to have an audience. You have to make work that lets audiences have the opportunity to find themselves, just as you are expressing yourself to let them know who you are,” explains Hirabayashi.

The work is based on exploring every human sense, imagining the transformation of the body outside of itself. Lachambre believes that the evolution of dance rests upon an abundance of ideas, as well as dynamic and continuous exchange. According to Hirabayashi, that is the purpose of the festival.

“If you can come out of witnessing a dance performance and say to yourself that you know yourself better, then that is what we seek to convey. We live to dance and we dance to live. That is our motto,” says Hirabayashi.