Marie Béland

For 15 years, Marie Béland has choreographed pieces where the body exceeds dance: the dancing body but also the real body, the day-to-day body, the ordinary body are all at the centre of a fine and complex choreographic organization. Béland invites the audience to think about live performance as a social and aesthetic phenomenon, and discover how our bodies transform themselves in contact with the stage. Each of her works is an attempt to reconcile body and mind, and unravel the discourses and counter-discourses that are tied to movement. In 2005, she founded her own company, maribé – sors de ce corps, with which she produced a series of singular pieces where indiscipline reigns with precision and cleverness, such as Dieu ne t’a pas créé juste pour danser (2008), which received the ARRIMAGES prize during its tour of the Maisons de la culture in Montreal, and was completely revamped in 2018 to be toured again, RAYON X: a true decoy story (2010), co-presented by Tangente and the Festival Les Coups de Théâtre, which has been seen on nearly 25 occasions in Quebec, BEHIND: une danse dont vous êtes le héros (2010), which was performed in Tangente, at the FTA, the ArtDanThé Festival in Vanves (FR) and the Agora de la danse, Révélations (2014), first presented at the GREC Festival (ES) and in its final version at Tangente, or BETWEEN (2015), presented at the ArtDanThé Festival, then at Théâtre 140 (BEL), the Agora de la danse and the Zagreb Sounded Bodies Festival (CRO). Béland is currently working on the creation of BESIDE, which closes the B + B + B trilogy, in partnership with Montréal Danse. Since her beginnings, she has done several residencies in Quebec and abroad (TanzWerkstatt Berlin, La Caldera Barcelona, Dance 4 Center for Choreography Nottingham, Cardiff Dance Festival, Opera Festival Bassano del Grappa). In 2018, she submitted her master’s thesis entitled Cartographie de la scène : les forces en jeu dans le spectacle vivant, which aims to define what is a show, and tries to understand its mechanisms.

Photo: Jean-François Brière