Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur (Quebec) – RESPONSE NEEDED

 

Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur (Quebec)

The program has been announced, and Tours en l'air is looking at a trip to support Guillaume Côté. Please let me know ASAP (toursenlair@gmail.com) if you would be interested in either of the hotel options below. This is not a commitment; it is just a way for me to gauge if there is enough interest for me to pursue this further. 
 

Wednesday August 10 - Saturday August 13, 2 performances (plus one optional)

Guillaume Côté and dancers of the National Ballet of Canada:

The Story of us (Marcelo Gomes, World Premiere, with Heather Ogden) 
Venom (Côté) 
The Sleeping Beauty prince's solo  
Dance me to the end of love (Côté)

Solos and pas de deux from the classical, neoclassical and contemporary repertoires:

• Guillaume Côté – National Ballet of  Canada
• Heather Ogden – National Ballet of  Canada
• Misty Copeland – American Ballet Theatre
• Blaine Hoven - American Ballet Theatre
• Nehemiah Kish – The Royal Ballet
• Yuhui Choe – The Royal Ballet
• Anne Plamondon - Independent artist
• more dancers TBA

Optional performance:

Louise Lecavalier and Frédéric Tavernini in So Blue.

I am looking at the following package:

Coach transport from Toronto to Saint-Sauveur including shuttle between hotel and performance venue

Lunch on the way to Saint-Sauveur and back

1 dinner in Saint-Sauveur

3 nights hotel

Ballet tickets

Day trip into Montreal from Saint-Sauveur

My current estimate for this trip is:

$1650 per person double occupancy, $225 in addition for guaranteed single occupancy – 4-star hotel, not including breakfast

The package price could be reduced by about $300 (and would include breakfast) if we stay at a 3-star hotel, but this hotel has

 no elevator

 a walk up a short but very steep hill to the entrance from the street (access is level from where the bus would drop us off)

For a description of the Saint-Sauveur experience, please click here: http://toursenlair.blogspot.ca/2011/08/festival-des-arts-de-saint-sauveur.html

If you love ballet, visiting beautiful places, seeing beautiful things, and enjoying great food, please check out my season of outstanding ballet trips by clicking here.

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Festival des arts de Saint-Sauveur

The picturesque village of Saint-Sauveur, Quebec, nestled in the folds of the pine-clad Laurentians, a spot better known for skiing and summer outdoor activities than for dance, but the location for the past twenty years of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur, which, under its artistic director Anik Bissonnette, goes from strength to strength bringing dancers from some of the world's best companies to perform in a circus-style tent. The village is, as you can see, a picture-postcard Québécois town, with the classic silver-roofed greystone church dominating the landscape, and the ski-jump roofs typical of habitant architecture. Like most resort towns, it has a main street ("rue Principale") lined with restaurants (I recommend Le sauvignon), clothing stores, ice cream shops, bakeries (I liked the date-filled "bear claws" at the Croissant Fou and the almond croissants at Pagé) and the like. You can take a tour in one of the horse drawn calèches found throughout tourist areas in Quebec. A factory outlet mall in faux-chalet style buildings on the edge of town provides opportunities for bargain shopping at Jones of New York, Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, and many other brand names. I stayed at the Hotel St-Sauveur, about 5 minutes walk from the "Factoreries" (and the bus stop for the Galland bus company which provides three buses a day between Saint-Sauveur and Montreal) and 20 minutes walk from downtown, and was very impressed by my lovely room.
The performances take place in a "Grand Chapiteau" (circus tent) just off rue Principale about a block from the church. The tent is spacious but with only 20 rows of seats provides an intimate experience. It is air-conditioned, much appreciated on the first sultry night I was there. If you have mobility issues, be warned however that you should get a seat on the "even numbers" side of rows A-C, as these are the only seats which are accessible without climbing any steps. Attending a dance performance here was a great experience, one I hope to repeat next year.

Gauthier Dance at Saint-Sauveur

The last program of my three-day ballet bash at FASS was Gauthier Dance from Stuttgart. I was particularly looking forward to this as I have known its director, Eric Gauthier, originally from Montreal, since he joined the Stuttgart Ballet in 1996 and have admired his determination and success with his small dance group in Stuttgart. Before the show, Eric gave a very charming introduction where he explained that he wants to make dance accessible to everyone, that you don't have to be a connoisseur of classical ballet to appreciate dancing, and that even the businessman in suit and tie who thinks he doesn't like dance when his wife drags him along to a performance will come away realizing that really he does. In particular, there is a tendency in German contemporary dance to be somewhat angst-ridden and impenetrable, with little sense of the fun that is evident in many Gauthier Dance productions.
Eric explained that the program was called "Lucky Seven" because of the seven very different pieces in the program, which are, as he said, like the seven colours of the rainbow in their variety. In each, the company of 8 (including Gauthier) proved to be both strong dancers and effective communicators.
My favourite was Hans van Manen's The Old Man and Me, depicting a relationship from seduction to separation. Although he originally choreographed the piece for Netherlands Dans Theater III (a company of dancers over 40), van Manen has allowed Gauthier to perform the male role "on condition that I dance it like a young man, not an old man, because I am still young". In the first section, the beautiful Isabelle Pollet-Villard, clad in an elegant purple velvet gown, tries all her teasing seductive wiles on Gauthier, who seems to remain unmoved. Then in the second section, danced to Stravinsky's Circus Polka (which coincidentally I had seen just two weeks before performed by young ballet students in Jerome Robbins' version), the sparks between the two fly. In the last section, set to the elegiac, yearning music of Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto, the relationship becomes bittersweet. In a sort of stop frame effect, the stage lights go on and off, with the couple finding themselves further apart each time the lights come on again,and finally exiting opposite sides of the stage as the last melancholy and beautiful strains of the music fade away.
In a world premiere by Mauro Bigonzetti, Pietra Viva, the title "living stone" seemed to refer to the fact that dance is like a breathing sculpture. The two dancers achieved remarkable feats of balance while leaning on one another, stepping on one another's feet, and in two striking instances having Anna Suheyla Harms standing on William Moragas's chest while he, supine, rotated around.
Eric also gave us a fascinating insight into the solo he choreographed for himself, Carlito. 10 months ago his son was born, and he recounts how he sat in the delivery room holding his wife's hand during 15 hours of labour. The oval shaped room made him think of a bull ring, and his situation seemed to him to be like that of a matador, fighting to get the baby out. It occurred to him that flamenco would be a good dance style to depict the strains of labour.
The piece starts with him unfolding a towel as the delivery room nurses apparently do in German hospitals, this towel being used to wrap the baby when it is born. At the end, the flamenco song turns into a few bars of Brahms Lullaby, and Gauthier artfully wraps the towel around his forearm and cradles it like a baby.
Shutters Shut by NDT choreographers Paul Lightfoot and Sol Leon is a duet set to a recording by Gertrude Stein of one of her poems. Though Lightfoot Leon created the role on a male and female dancer, when Paul Lightfoot saw the two couples that Gauthier had sent to learn the roles, he liked the male dancers so much that he felt it would work best on them. As a result, we see Armando Braswell and Rosario Guerra perform the piece, their rapid movements reflecting Stein's machine-gun recitation.
You can see snippets of all of the above pieces on Gauthier Dance's latest trailer (which also includes Kylian's Sechs Tanze, which wasn't on the Saint-Sauveur program):

The program finished with the humorous Orchestra of Wolves, in which an orchestra conductor comes to a bad end when conducting the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The idea for this piece came from a discussion Eric had with the Stuttgart Ballet's music director about what it is like conducting such a powerful piece of music. The conductor said it was terrifying, feeling that the musicians will massacre him if he makes the slightest mistake with the movement of his baton. Gauthier therefore depicts the conductor as a bird facing a pack of wolves ready to devour him. You can see snippets of it in this video: