OUT OF GRACE

A project in five phases by Lynda Gaudreau
Five spaces, five weeks, five performers and five visual artists

Coproduced by the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery and Lynda Gaudreau | Compagnie De Brune

Artists: Alexandre David, Jérôme Fortin, Aude Moreau, Yann Pocreau and Chih-Chien Wang • Performers: Karina Iraola, Anne Thériault, Émilie Morin, Amélie Bédard-Gagnon, Marilyne St-Sauveur • Intern-performers: Josianne Latreille, Josiane Fortin, Anouk Thériault, Élise Bergeron, Marie-Pier Bazinet, Corinne Crane-Desmarais, Nancy Rivest, Catherine Lepage, Karenne Gravel, Chantal Hausler, Andrée-Anne Ratthé, Eugénia Khoury, Chloe Millsop-Melançon, Raphaëlle Perreault, Amélie Rajotte, Gabrielle Surprenant-Lacasse • Extras: Jeanne Dubé-Blanchet, Ariane Dubé-Lavigne, Anne Trudel, Eve Leclair, Olivia Lathuilliere, Marie-Pier Morin, Renée-Anne Patenaude-Blais • Creative Assistance: Matteo Fargion and Anne Thériault • Lighting: Alexandre Pilon-Guay • Sound Design: Alexandre St-Onge


Montreal choreographer Lynda Gaudreau has developed a project for the Gallery’s exhibition spaces. This hybrid and experimental project, at the borders of choreography and exhibition making is at once a choreographed exhibition and an exhibited choreography that questions the nature and relationship of these practices.

What might an exhibition beginning with dance and ending with visual art be? From its opening to its closing, how does the exhibition space include the living body? How does this body coexist with the artworks in the contested space of the gallery?

In and with the space itself, OUT OF GRACE, employs choreographic tools in rethinking the white cube. Choreography is not restricted to the body but also addresses the organization and continual construction of space. Visual artists have been invited to create works over the five weeks during which the exhibition takes place, thus encouraging the public to visit the gallery repeatedly. Over time the works and the exhibition spaces will be transformed, as will the visitor’s experience.

OUT OF GRACE is both dynamic and playful. Elementary devices such as sound, lighting and the presence of the body draw the visitor in and activate modes of display and perception, addressed here according to a performative and compositional logic. What is entailed by these modes when works coexist with the body? How does experiencing sound, lighting, their activation and deactivation become a tool to sharpen our perception? Little by little, the white space of the Gallery is filled by intensities, by a noise that immerses it in silence, in a dense and mute experience of the body, the object and space.

EXPLORE

• Time and its importance in Out of Grace. How is time organized here and what cues, sequences, rhythms are you able to discern that provide clues to the temporal structure of this project?
  
  
• The workings of space in this project. Reflect on the numerous ways in which it is created, made use of, and transformed.
  
  
• The notions of performance and performativity. How might they apply to Out of Grace and what is being accomplished here? Consider the performers, the artworks, the lighting, and the sound. How do each of these contribute to the performance or the performative nature of this project?
  
  
• The positioning of the artworks in this project in terms of how they interact with the sound, the lighting, the bodies that are all simultaneously present in the Gallery and what effect do these elements have on them?
  
  
• The choreographic score. Such a document exists for this project. Reflect on all of the elements that might be included in such a document, what it might ultimately look like, and how it might be read or interpreted.
  
  
• The ways in which each of the artworks presented in Out of Grace is an integral part of this choreographic score.
  
  

THE ARTISTS