Choreographer: Mélanie Demers/MAYDAY [Montréal]
Performer & Dramaturg: Angélique Willkie
In Confession Publique, we take on the themes of privacy and secrecy, delving into the marshy depths of the psyche in a revolt against the vulgar self-exposure that bombards us every day. We examine the nobility and elegance to be found in the ways we acknowledge our shortcomings, our flaws, and our manufacturing defects. We try to see confession as a poetic gesture, a necessity, a small concession to our vanity. The protagonist concentrates on the margins as she takes a deep dive into herself and ourselves. The performance becomes the setting for questions asked a thousand times over: our relationship to the world, how the environment holds our destinies in its hands, and the power others have to dictate and dominate our life-choices. This solo performance is the keystone research-creation project of the SSHRC grant Corporeal Dramaturgy: Redistributing Agency in Dance and of the overall SSHRC and FRQ-SC-funded Dramaturgical Ecologies program. Using my personal dramaturgical input as the anchor for the creation, the work evokes my blackness without ever centering it as a primary focus and has provided me the opportunity to explore my dramaturgical praxis from this perspective. Most importantly, Confession Publique is the embodied context that has given me access to the experiential frictions, interrogations and conceptual musings that are the focus of Dramaturgical Ecologies and that are the impulse for Murmurations.
VIDEO CONFESSION PUBLIQUE