With Promesses, Louise Bédard casts her choreographer’s sensitive gaze on the visual arts, sculpting space and creating encounters between bodies and materials: fabric, miniature objects, collages of words. She crafts duos attuned to the evolving intimacy of the six dancers, plays with various textures of interpretation and dares to digress so that the ephemeral confronts the real passage of time. What emerges is a space of shared solitudes that magnifies both the dance and its minimalist movement.

This ensemble piece marks the 30^th anniversary of her company Louise Bédard Danse and continues the aesthetic and human quest that began with La Démarquise.

With each new work, Louise Bédard invites other forms of art to be part of the creative process. Here a romantic tableau by Caspar David Friedrich inspires a certain ambiguity of bodies in a duo performed by Alejandro De Leon and Louis-Elyan Martin. Harnessing the energy of the young dancers Sébastien Provencher and Marilyn Daoust, she gives them the opportunity to display their virtuosity while coping with the challenge of minimalism and immobility. Collages of words taken from an original text by the writer Guylaine Massoutre clear the way for impromptu songs sung by the dancers Marie Claire Forté and Nicolas Patry.

Each duo is a stand-alone piece evoking myriad possible relations beyond the paradigm of the couple, with ensemble movement between each piece forming an echo and counterpoint to the whole.