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Cabane

Paul-André Fortier’s Cabane is an imaginative, evocative work well-deserving of the acclaim that has been showered upon it

Ever since ill-fated Icarus fell from the sky, human beings have dreamt of flight. This mythology ideal runs like a delicate thread throughout Canadian dance icon Paul-André Fortier’s Cabane that ran February 4 to 6 at the Rachel Browne Theatre. Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers co-presented the critically acclaimed touring production as its penultimate show of the season.

The 60-minute show, performed by Fortier with his longtime collaborator, visual artist/writer/musician Rober Racine, has toured to the U.K., Belgium, France and throughout Canada since its 2008 premiere at Montreal’s Festival TransAmériques. Billed as part in situ performance and part installation art, Cabane also includes Racine’s live score and projected images by filmmaker Robert Morin. Considered to be one of the country’s elite choreographers, the Montreal-based Fortier, now in his early 60s, last appeared here in March 2005 when he performed his harrowing duet Tensions.

Cabane flows like a river of surrealistic images, à la Beckett’s enigmatic Waiting for Godot. Daniel Vallée’s set design consisting of a rustic wooden shack — the cabin of the title — suggests a shelter, mausoleum, prison cell, womb and cage. The performers gradually empty its contents, revealing a Pandora’s box of junkyard instruments: creaky box springs strung with piano wire, harmonicas cleverly inset in tripods; water bottles hung by cable that is eventually plucked like a washtub bass to accompany Fortier’s graceful movement. A sense of gritty industrialism pervades the show, juxtaposed with Denis Lavoie’s pedestrian costumes of shirts, ties and trousers that, in turn, lend an Everyman feel to the two all-too-human characters.

As the non-narrative work plays out, the two men spar, arm wrestle, play tricks on each other and create magical sub-worlds as they while away their day. A ballroom appears with Fortier seductively moving to Racine’s nasally vocals; box springs suddenly become a harp; shadow play abounds as the two men stretch their arms into space to create images of beating wings. Stage technicians freely come and go, creating a further counterpoint while breaking the all-elusive fourth wall.

Projected images of vultures periodically cast on the shack’s walls lace the work with strange beauty and foreboding danger. They are given full voice when Racine’s bloodcurdling shrieks evoke screaming birds, piercing the heart like nothing else.

In the end, Cabane is many things. It’s about relationships and our connections with each other. It’s about resilience and resolve. It’s about physical space as a way to define our innermost worlds and selves. But mostly, it’s about the power of artistic imagination, and the hand of a true dance master at work that gives flight to all dreams.