Helen Simard
Creation Laboratory
I am an intense, deeply emotional, all or nothing kind of person. I create shows that aim to trigger states of sensorial overload for audiences in order to steer them away from logical thinking into more affective, visceral ways of being. I use movement, live music, and text as my primary materials and try to create space for the messy, the raw, the undefinable, unsettled parts of humanity. For me, art is a space where I can feel fully alive, fully myself, and in order to achieve this, I must create paradoxical works that are at once beautiful and disturbing, accessible and provoking, familiar and strange.
In this creation laboratory, I will draw on compositional and improvisational techniques used in my recent projects (PAPILLON, Because You Never Asked, Quand je ferme mes yeux, Par nécessité) and invite participants to order to join me as we explore notions of order and disorder, metamorphosis, the cyclical nature of the self – change, loss, grief, acceptance and growth – the strangeness that lives inside us, finding freedom in confinement, loneliness and togetherness, singularity and similarity, and the importance of human connection. Together, we will know and unknow. We will do and undo. We will search and we will get lost. We will laugh. We will live. We will listen. We will learn. We will dance. A lot. We will make space for each other in all of our complexity.
Live music will be provided throughout the week by my long-term collaborator, Roger White.
Photo: ©Do Phan Hoi
Helen
Simard
We All Fall Down Creations
Creation Laboratory
May 29 to June 2
2:15 p.m. to 6:15 p.m.
(20 hours)
​
​
Open sharing on June 2
6:15 pm to 6:45 pm - Location to be confirmed
​
​
Wilder Building
Studio: to be confirmed
Helen Simard
​
Helen Simard is a choreographer and dance dramaturge. Originally from Kingston, Ontario, she relocated to Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal in 1996. Simard collaborates with musicians and dancers to create visceral interdisciplinary shows. Her work uses repetition, complex spatial patterns and techniques of sensory overwhelm to create hypnotic, dreamlike performances that blur the boundaries between conscious and subconscious spaces. Past works such as NO FUN (2014), IDIOT (2017), REQUIEM POP (2019), and PAPILLON (2020) are joyfully chaotic and complex in their simplicity, walking a fine line between the real and the imaginary. Simard holds a BFA (Concordia University, 2000) and MA in Dance (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2014). Her current research explores themes relating to loss, memory, nostalgia, and intergenerational exchange. She is artist-in-residence in the Department of Contemporary Dance at Concordia University, where she teaches choreography and creative process, and has also been an invited instructor at l’École de danse contemporaine de Montréal and l'école national du cirque. In 2019, Simard founded We All Fall Down | Interdisciplinary Creations (WAFD) with the composer Roger White. Under their co-artistic direction, WAFD values live performance as a place for experimentation and risk-taking in order to deconstruct/reinvent the body and its ways of relating to time and space - both for the performers and the audience. Through their creations, the body is speaking, dancing, musical, impulsive, vulnerable, hybrid, powerful, dislocated, emotional.