RADIOMATON (2022)

January 2022

Fabricate your own truth for free.

Appropriate words and gestures, embody radio news and contribute to the propagation of information without verification.

 A total sensory and immersive experience, RADIOMATON questions the construction of truth, media contamination, fake news and the role of the body in the perception of information.

Installed in a cubicle resembling a photo booth and equipped with headphones broadcasting live a local radio station, each RADIOMATON user must repeat aloud the words they hear, while imitating the gestures that are displayed on the screen in front of them. This recorded performance, mingling movements and words that do not match together, is remixed in a kaleidoscope where all meanings intersect.

AUTOMATIC – INSTANTANEOUS – TECHNICOLOR
IN ONLY 5 MINUTES

Co-designed by Marie Béland and Simon Laroche

A coproduction by MARIBÉ – SORS DE CE CORPS and MONTRÉAL DANSE

The RADIOMATON installation is conceived to be either a stand-alone or an experience to co-exist with the show BESIDE.

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Teaser

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Photos

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Calendar

Next dates : July 26th to August 6th, 2023 at Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur
For more information, visit our calendar.

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Artistic credits

A creation by Marie Béland and Simon Laroche
A coproduction and artistic partnership by MARIBÉ – SORS DE CE CORPS and Montréal Danse
Performers : Rachel Harris, Sylvain Lafortune and Bernard Martin
Dramaturge : Kathy Casey
Booking : Art Circulation

RADIOMATON receives the financial support of Canada Council for the Arts.

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RADIOMATON: its origins and intentions

Seeking to give the public a concrete experience similar to that of the performers of the stage work BESIDE (creation Marie Béland, presented since 2019 in Quebec and Europe), we, Marie Béland and Simon Laroche, began the creation of what would become the RADIOMATON.

The RADIOMATON offers a great challenge for participants: they have to speak and move at the same time while listening to a live radio station, superimposing gestures and words that do not do not belong together. RADIOMATON, like BESIDE, questions the construction of truth, media contamination, “fake news” and the role of the body in the perception of information.

We are interested in glitches, glitches of systems, but also glitches of individuals by placing them in situations that are practically impossible to get out of brilliantly. RADIOMATON has the potential to bring out a touching and authentic state of cognitive overload in participants. This is a fascinating state, to our eyes, of an ultra-presence to information that translates into a quasi-physical absence where social filters disappear for the benefit of the task at hand.

 

Our research revolved around three axes:

– creating a mediation work, in the sense of creating a bridge linking the real, kinesthetic experience of the users of RADIOMATON to their visual and sensory experience of the stage work BESIDE. We wanted to bring to life a state of mental overload, generated in part by the dissociation between reproduced gestures and repeated words, similar to the way the performers experience it on stage. We also wanted RADIOMATON to be an autonomous object, unlinked to BESIDE, allowing participants to experience this state of dissociation within their own body;

– using the digital technologies specific to Simon’s work, to revisit the movements coming from screens, television and digital media that were the origin for the movements used in the show BESIDE. The RADIOMATON programming algorithm combines, then deconstructs and fragments both visual and audio information, bringing into play our own view of the validity of the content that our screens send us. By giving users the opportunity to see themselves mechanically repeating what has been dictated to them, and by integrating fragments of these performances into a large video kaleidoscope of all the participants in a web of words and gestures, we wanted to accentuate this disconnection between movement and discourse, and thus bring out aspects specific to each – normativity of bodily expression on television, semiology of gesture, informational entropy;

– deepening the themes at the heart of Marie’s approach to dance, which consists of examining the discourses and counter-discourses of movement. Marie is particularly interested in the choreography produced by our speaking bodies: which body, which movement and for which discourse? While questioning the impact of the media on our ways of perceiving and understanding information and opinions, as well as the role that body and gesture can play in the credibility of discourse, we wanted to see how dance, media and interactive arts, can help us understand how we are affected by the way information is transmitted to us today.

In order to encourage participation and create an inviting, accessible work, we created an object looking like a photo booth. By playing with the codes of installation art and the image of these booths present in the collective imagination, we created a familiar space, easy to use, but one that disturbs at the same time, by the performance stance that we invite participants to take, staging of their own image.

Marie Béland and Simon Laroche

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Contacts

Marie Béland | General and Artistic Director of MARIBÉ – SORS DE CE CORPS
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Kathy Casey | Artistic Director of Montréal Danse
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Jamie Wright | Codirector of Art Circulation, representation Québec and Canada
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Karolina Rychlik | Codirector of Art Circulation, representation Europe and Asia
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Luce Couture | Booking agent – Québec and Canada
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Artistic team

Rachel Harris
Rachel Harris / performer collaborator

Native from Vancouver, Rachel Harris moved to Montreal in 1990 and continued her training at l’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. Following her training, she joined Danse Partout in Quebec and co-founded Amorce Danse Théâtre. She collaborates, throughout her career, with the choreographers Blanca Arrieta, Marie Béland, Martin Bélanger, Sarah Bild, Sarah Chase, Estelle Clareton, Margie Gillis, Anne-Marie Giroux, Benjamin Hatcher, Avi Kaiser, Benoît Lachambre, Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, Helge Letonja, Jean-Sébastien Lourdais, Jean-Pierre Mondor, José Navas, Aurélie Pédron, Jean-Pierre Perreault, George Stamos, Mariko Tanabe and Paula de Vasconcelos. She created in 2002-2003 The Coyote Project, a work for four performers, in close cooperation with the Nlaka’pamux community of British Columbia. Since 2011, she has been teaching for women in shelters as part of the Dance Against Violence program..

Work related: RADIOMATON, BESIDE, Dieu ne t’a pas créé juste pour danser, BETWEEN, BEHIND : une danse dont vous êtes le héros

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sylvain lafortune
Sylvain Lafortune / interprète collaborateur

Sylvain Lafortune has had a professional career since 1979 which has led him to work for renowned companies such as Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, O’Vertigo and Montréal Danse in Montreal, Lar Lubovitch Dance Co., Susan Marshall and Co. and Martha Clarke in New York. Travelling around the world, he danced some of the greatest works of the classical and contemporary repertoire. Now a freelance dancer, he also devotes himself to teaching, both in the circus and in dance. Following his research at the master’s and doctoral level (UQAM), Sylvain Lafortune has for some years become an authority in teaching the work of a dance partner.

Works related: RADIOMATON, BESIDE

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bernard martin
Bernard Martin / Interprète collaborateur

Since 1979, Bernard Martin mixes types and styles, oscillating between ballet-jazz, classical and contemporary dance. He began his professional career in 1991. Since then, he has visited a wide range of companies and collaborated with several choreographers: Les Grands Ballets Canadiens (Nacho Duato, Ohad Naharin, Jiry Kilian, Mark Morris, Georges Balanchine, Fernand Nault and more), Montréal Danse (Jose Navas, Paula de Vasconcelos, Marie Béland and more) , La Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, Système D/Dominique Porte, La La La Human Steps (Édouard Lock), Le Carré des Lombes (Danièle Desnoyers), Louise Bédard Danse, Creations Estelle Clareton and Susanna Hood. Since 2009, Bernard Martin has been teaching ballet for contemporary dancers and performing at the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. Finally, Bernard Martin was a member of the company La La La Human Steps, directed by Édouard Lock, from 2001 to 2009, with which he performed on the stages of the world’s major cultural capitals. He played prominent roles in AMJAD, AMÉLIA – ballet and film – as well as in LES BORÉADES, an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, choreographed by Édouard Lock and presented at the Opéra de Paris. More recently, Bernard Martin participated in the last creation of Danièle Desnoyers, DÉVORER LE CIEL.

Related work: RADIOMATON, BESIDE, Déplacements sonores

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Simon Laroche – Cocreator

Artist, teacher, and interaction designer, Simon Laroche creates installations, audio and video performances, robotic and body artworks. He casts a critical point of view on the hybridization and development of various biological, artificial, and social systems. Co-founder of the art collective, Projet EVA, he creates critical, experimental, and transgressive artworks that focus on problematics related to relationships between individuals, computer systems, and their physical extensions. Simon Laroche teaches Electronic Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and collaborates on theatre, fashion design, dance, and cinema productions. His installations, performances and collaborative works have been presented in Asia, Europe, South and North America and in the Middle East.

Related work : RADIOMATON

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Kathy Casey
Kathy Casey

Artistic Director of Montréal Danse since 1996, Kathy Casey works as a dramaturge with choreographers who are rethinking, redefining and reworking what is dance. Through a process of deep questioning of performance and the body, she encourages bold ideas and discovering ways to express them and give them form. She also organizes and facilitates an annual choreographic research workshop, runs research labs and facilitates or co-facilitates dance and interdisciplinary dramaturgy workshops. In addition to her responsibilities with Montréal Danse, Kathy Casey works as an artistic advisor for several independent choreographers in Montreal.

Related works : Réunion.s – titre provisoire,RADIOMATON, BESIDE, BETWEEN

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Photo : George Dutil


Marie Béland – Cocreator

Marie Béland graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in contemporary dance creation. She then founded her company, MARIBÉ-SORS DE CE CORPS, to support her choreographic work. For the past 20 years, Marie has distinguished herself through works that invite reflection from both young and general publics, and that have been presented in theaters, festivals, private and public spaces in Quebec, Canada, Europe and Africa. Drawing from our different uses of the body and the gestures that make up our daily lives, Marie organizes banal movement to make it danceable and complex. The stage acts to reveal the troubled zones of fiction inverting the true, the false and the plausible. Her creations approach live performance as a social and aesthetic phenomenon, an opportunity to study the transformations that our ordinary bodies undergo in contact with the stage. Marie is also a co-founder of La 2e Porte à Gauche (2003-2018), and is publishing her master’s thesis in 2019 entitled Cartographie de la scène: les forces en jeu dans le spectacle vivant, which seeks to question the object of performance and understand its workings.
Photo : Jean-François Brière


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