Interiors (2007)

A choreographic work by Laurence Lemieux

Interiors explores the symmetry of a family – the mother and father, the little girl and boy – a narrative that encompasses children on the eve of change. Lemieux has structured her work simply – in the first section the family members appear one by one; the second is a duet for Laurence Lemieux and Bill Coleman, while the third section is danced by their children, eleven-year-old Jimmy, and eight-year-old Juliette. They move through recurring partnerings, dancing sometimes alone, at times together, mother and daughter, father and son, husband and wife. This structural elegance evokes an underlying complexity, projections backward and forward through time, provoking us to wonder, from whom do the memories flow? The family members are archetypal characters, claims of love and responsibility binding them.

Their shared language is dancing, as natural as walking might be to others.

Interiors sings a mysterious refrain of genetics – how rare to see a family of four dancers – and observing the Coleman/Lemieuxs, we see, beyond resemblance, a world of dynamic shaping, shared DNA, messages and codes; the arch of a foot, the proportion of bone to bone, the exact calibration of shape and the interior of the joints. When they move, the children etch echoing calligraphies, matching traces left by their parents.

In the midst of apparent domestic disorder, family members move on their own paths, up and down the stage. Laurence’s solo at the end of the first section spirals and coils around a centre; the red floor seems reminiscent of a log cabin quilt’s middle square, the hearth, the family heart.

The line between reality and art in Interiors is mutable.       

Lemieux notes, “… I can’t develop a sophisticated vocabulary with the kids – it is more about how they innately move and about who they are.” So we see the deftness of the eight-year-old, the incisive swiftness of the eleven-year-old – the children’s physicality is quick and light; and within the overall work, metaphors hover and resolve, resonant and poignant.

When Jimmy and Bill dance together, the movement is playful and supportive, revealing dad’s gravity and care and the awakening, responsive balancing by his son. Adult knowledge, vigilant, hidden from children, is there, the choreographer says, in part as contrast, “so the children’s world is more radiant.”

While his father dances, Jimmy is writing, and later he creates a path of paper along which his parents walk. Their dance evolves from describing “the mechanics of marriage”, into idiosyncratic expressions of deliberation, accommodation, inner necessity and tenderness within their twining solitudes.

Schubert’s poignant piano music threads through the dance with sepia-toned emotion, music from another time that pervades an evolving present. At the end, the children play, liberated and safe within their home, suspended in a floating world of possibility. Interiors exists in a glimmer of ghostly time warp, the children cocooned in the secret night, eternally young yet poised on the imminence of change. The choreographer muses that she has created Interiors to capture the importance and significance of this beautiful moment in her family, because, she says, “We know, in the children’s transformation, that part of our lives will disappear.”

Carol Anderson

_{Image:Laurence Lemieux by Paul-Antoine Taillefer}