International Dance Day 2018: Québec Message from Mélanie Demers

Whether we completely abandon ourselves to it or attempt to resist it, we’re all part of the world’s great movement. Ineluctably, this complex system, beyond all comprehension, observes the human ballet, where bodies, by turns, conquer and beguile the other, stoop, touch, kill, and slip away, and where they love, mesh and coalesce before succumbing to exhaustion and one day dying out.

This is the order we obey.

By way of a challenge, we allow love and death to simultaneously inhabit us, we seek out the brutal, thermal, seismic shock that only a body that’s exulted can experience.

Dance is but the expression of that desire for what is absolute and absolutely free.

Because we fear this world’s great movement, this overwhelmingly powerful life force, we try in vain to harness it by ordering our gestures, regulating our steps and codifying the human impetus.

Perhaps only those who truly fear movement attempt to dominate it. Those who do so move me. They are my peers and soulmates, and it is they who transform dance into a performance. The others, imbued with a deeper wisdom, simply let the steps overtake them.

Whether our dance is invested with a pure need for action or a desire for creation, our bodies are heroic and erotic; they are carnal vessels made of flesh and blood, noble and out of the ordinary, inhabited and habitable.

Above all, our bodies are sovereign, capable of politicizing our debates and poeticizing our existences—which collide relentlessly within this world’s great movement.

Mélanie Demers
Choreographer, General and Artistic Director, MAYDAY
► Biography 

Production: Regroupement québécois de la danse
Message: Mélanie Demers, general and artistic director of MAYDAY
Filming, montage: Xavier Curnillon