Concept and direction Andréane Leclerc
Dramaturgy Myriam Stéphanie Perraton Lambert
Costumes Olivia Pia Audet
Producer Geoffroy Faribault
Production Nadère arts vivants
(X) invites the public to enter a vast space immersed in darkness and silence, where they can position themselves wherever they prefer and remain for as long as they wish. A woman stands motionless in front of a light source. Swaying in an almost hypnagogic state, she daydreams. Her face is concealed. Listening and looking within herself, her body speaks, inviting the audience to imagine their own experience alongside her.
This minimalist installation performed by Andréane Leclerc follows in the footsteps of Di(x)parue (2009), a turning point in the artist’s career that marked the beginning of a fundamental research process on new embodied practices. Driven by a desire to periodically revisit and renew the work until her 70th birthday, Leclerc created (X) in 2022. This rewriting process took place 13 years after the original work was performed in gardens (Trois-Rivières, Quebec), theatres (Montreal, Quebec), museums (San Luis Potosí, Mexico) and 13th-century thermal baths (Inca, Spain). In this way, (X) is a kind of progression, allowing the practitioner to measure and reflect on the distances she has travelled.
Returning to one’s ‘X’ means reconnecting, listening to oneself and allowing oneself to resonate with the world in order to bring new needs to the surface. This pause is fundamental to an artistic practice that seeks to deconstruct its relationship with the spectacular and with the art of contortion, a technique that Andréane Leclerc has been practicing since she was very young.
A conceptual and performance artist, Andréane Leclerc is interested in human encounters that lead her towards interdisciplinary and inter-artistic processes. Trained as a contortionist (National Circus School of Montreal, 2001), she draws inspiration from her 20 years of circus practice to reflect on contortion as a philosophical posture and develop her stage language. Her approach, centered on listening, relational ecology and perceptive attention, is part of the new bodily practices emerging from the somatic and performative fields.
In 2013, she completed a master’s degree in dramaturgy of skill at the UQAM theatre department. In the same year, together with her partner Geoffroy Faribault, she founded the company Nadère arts vivants to continue her exploration of a body/matter that evolves in sensation rather than sensationalism. She has created the conceptual works Di(x)parue 2009; Bath House 2013; Mange-Moi 2013; Cherepaka 2014; The Whore of Babylon Featuring The Tiger Lillies 2015; Sang Bleu 2018; À l’Est de Nod 2022 and (X), currently in creation. His works have been presented in Tokyo, Florence, Cairo, Tenerife, São Paulo, Guadalajara, Chicago, Rouyn-Noranda and Montreal, on contemporary stages, but also in museums and galleries.
Alongside her artistic career, Andréane Leclerc is a teacher and has been giving contortion classes for physical artists since 2015. She also develops interdisciplinary dramaturgy workshops for circus, dance, theatre and performance artists (Studio 303, En Piste, Playwrights workshop Montreal in Montreal, La Gata Cirko in Bogota, La Grainerie in Toulouse, Fabbrica Europa in Florence). In 2017, she participated in the creation of Cirque OFF, a living manifesto for the biodiversity of circus arts in Montreal (Studio 303). She also occasionally works as a dramaturgy and movement consultant (Dialogue of Disobedience & Black light, white noise by and with Dana Dugan, 2018 and 2022) and performs in various international projects (Variations pour une déchéance annoncée by Angela Konrad, 2012; The Tiger Lillies Perform Hamlet since 2016).