Songs of Love and Collapse: DLD / Frédérick Gravel

Celebrate the Complicated

If you’ve never experienced a performance by Montreal’s Frédérick Gravel, be prepared to lose your bearings. Fusing raw, physical virtuosity with various artistic genres, and music performed by a live band – with Gravel himself on guitar - his works are refreshingly unpretentious, and dance to the riff of their own strum. The audience is invited into an outlandish happening, one where dance is demystified, where paradox and contrast turn the performance upside down.

For Gravel, the stage offers a place to explore the fragile, to create a shared space that aims to search rather than assert, all in direct complicity with the viewer. In this new creation, Songs of Love and Collapse, it is also a place to celebrate frictions and misunderstandings as we navigate together the tensions of our times and our disconnections from each other. We witness the vulnerability of bodies under the illusion of control; propelled by music, they revel in the complexities of a world we don’t recognize anymore.

Frédérick Gravel is part of a new wave of choreographers whose work is presented at both underground venues and international stages. He is a key proponent of the democratization of dance.