Linda Besner and another dancer entwined for an exercise during rehearsal at the University of Quebec in Montreal, for a professional production at Festival Trans-Amérique.Karene-Isabelle Jean-Baptiste/The Globe and Mail
It’s the dying that takes up most of my energy. Mortitos, the choreographer calls them – little deaths. We start out with the trust falls you might do at a sleepover or a corporate retreat; one person falling backward into another’s arms. Then the stakes skyrocket: Now the falling person dies into the arms of a catcher sitting on the ground; now, the catcher stands some distance away and must dive between the falling person and the floor. Murmurs of unease ripple through the room.
This is the rehearsal period for Multitud, a dance performance the Uruguayan choreographer Tamara Cubas is creating for Montreal’s Festival TransAmérique. I answered an open call for what the festival refers to as “citizen dancers” – no experience is required to join the show – which is how I come to find myself circulating in a school gym through a crowd of a hundred people (98 to be exact), following a series of increasingly bizarre instructions. “You could hurt yourself a bit,” Cubas calls out. “It’s normal.” We never leave a relationship unscathed, she remarks. “A body that has no scars has no experiences.” The days are long – 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. – and we’ll be putting on three evening shows in a public square downtown, after a week of rehearsals. During a running exercise on our first day, someone crashes into me and knocks me to the floor. I’m left with a mauve bruise on my knee reflecting my new experiences.
On the second day, the mortitos get even scarier. Now the entire group stands in two facing lines, and someone walks up and down in the space between until they choose to die. The closest people rush to catch them. “Now take a step back,” Cubas instructs us. The room is deathly quiet as we move farther and farther apart with each successful fall and capture, until there is so much distance between us that only the fastest runners can meet the falling person before they hit the ground. I sprint to help catch a woman’s vulnerable falling body. When the exercise concludes, I take a moment apart to cry. I don’t mind being the one who falls; I believe someone will catch me. What terrifies me is holding someone else’s life in my hands.
Choreographer Tamara Cubas has been mounting the show with citizen dancers in different countries for more than a decade.Karene-Isabelle Jean-Baptiste/The Globe and Mail
Karene-Isabelle Jean-Baptiste/The Globe and Mail
When I signed up, I imagined toe-taps, synchronized arm movements, the kind of dance classes I attended as a kid. It’s becoming clear that this performance is driven by deeper political questions than a toe-tap can convey. As the rehearsals progress, people start to ask for more structure, more planning, more rules. Cubas listens politely to our concerns, and then tells us we are free to make our own choices. While our performance of Multitud will be unique, Cubas has been mounting the show with citizen dancers in different countries for more than a decade. The choreography grew out of her experience of the military dictatorship that seized Uruguay in the 1970s. Society was heavily constrained; members of her own circle were exiled or disappeared. “People can become obsessed with rules,” she tells us. She is offering us a radical kind of freedom. “You are responsible for your own body,” she emphasizes.
We are forming the social contract as we go. Rules, Cubas tells us, are not where safety comes from. I can feel our group, bruised and tired, wrestling with the desire to lay down laws, as if some magic combination of words could force human relationships to conform to static principles. Instead, we are learning to move through the space autonomously, but with a heightened awareness of each other. We sense when to move, and when to stop. When to run, when to scream. When to lock eyes with another person and stand still together while the collective around us whirls with motion.
A group of dancers listens to instructions from Ms. Cubas.Karene-Isabelle Jean-Baptiste/The Globe and Mail
We do not all have the same capacities (although each of us will receive a $600 honorarium for our week of work). The youngest in the group look to be in their twenties. These are the fastest runners, the highest jumpers, the bodies that conform most closely to what most people think a “dancer” looks like. The oldest participants look to be in their seventies or perhaps even their eighties.
In an exercise called “the catapult,” I work with a tiny woman with powerful blue eyes and white curls like the whipped topping on a cupcake. At first it feels incredibly wrong to grab her by her brittle arms and push her – launch her – into space. But she comes running right back to do it again. She is searingly beautiful to watch. Later, I stand, spellbound, as a young woman and a seemingly fragile elderly man grapple; they pull at each other’s clothes, bring each other to the floor. Something fierce and comic and animalistic thrills through their encounter, as though I’m watching alley cats or wolves. It’s play, of a primal, pre-linguistic variety.
Dancers throw pieces of clothing during rehearsals.Karene-Isabelle Jean-Baptiste/The Globe and Mail
The show is in just a few days. Cubas has left it intentionally unclear how one sequence will bleed into the next. We have “Katrina,” and “birds,” and “mortitos,” and “catapult,” but the way one morphs into another is subject to the group’s collective energy – what scientists, observing the movement of starlings, call emergence. A woman puts her hand up, voicing a fear I’m also feeling: that she will get lost. Cubas smiles. “It is beautiful to watch someone who is lost,” she says.
Multitud, part of Montreal’s Festival TransAmérique, takes place Thursday-Saturday.
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