Dance Me brings BJM-Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal back on the road with its biggest show
The return of the multimedia tribute to Leonard Cohen is part of the contemporary-dance company’s 50th anniversary year
Dance Me is a large-scale multimedia tribute to Leonard Cohen. Photo by Thierry du Bois/Cosmos Image
BJM-Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal presents Dance Me on August 30 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
TAKE IT AS A CLEAR sign that touring is back in a big way, with the arrival of BJM-Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal, the acclaimed Canadian contemporary-dance company that has made its name travelling Europe and the world.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the honed troupe returns to Vancouver for the first time since 2018 for a one-night-only performance of the biggest show in its history: Dance Me, a mesmerizing multimedia work inspired by the music of Leonard Cohen that took three years and $500,000 to create.
“In a way it feels like being home to be back in theatres,” American-born dancer Shanna Irwin tells Stir over a call from a tour stop in Calgary.
“For me it’s like when you connect with a book and you just leave it open till you get back,” adds her colleague, Cuban-trained sensation and soloist Yosmell Calderon Mejias. “There’s so much pleasure and so much connection that everything is enjoyable right now. We all love to travel a lot.”
Before Cohen died in 2016, he had already given his blessing to the production under BJM’s then-artistic director Louis Robitaille (the longtime leader who passed the reins of the company to Alexandra Damiani last year). The 80-minute, 14-dancer piece is built around a playlist of Cohen’s songs, older and more recent, well-known and obscure.
Tunes like Suzanne and Nevermind are not necessarily the kind of songs one would traditionally think of for dancing, but Irwin and Calderon have found no shortage of poetry and emotion to drive the movement, commissioned from cutting-edge Euro choreographers Andonis Foniadakis, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Ihsan Rustem. Classic Cohen themes of mortality and sexuality play out in a flow of vignettes.
“There’s something about his voice that helps you get to such a deep place,” Irwin explains. “It’s almost like the poetry of his music is seen through the physicality of our bodies.”
Dancer Yosmell Calderon Mejias
Dancer Shanna Irwin
In Dance Me, Calderon says he’s honoured to play a figure who represents Cohen himself throughout the work. “I needed to go into the genesis of his life,” he says, “through research and history. I love to read Cohen, and I love to know everything about him.”
“We’re not really telling a story, but dancing as a way of celebrating his legacy,” Irwin adds.
In some ways, it feels that Cohen is there, they add. When he isn’t singing, his unmistakable, gravelly speaking voice is sometimes part of the soundscape. “Even before the company began to create the piece they had permission from him, so they feel that part of his soul is in the creation,” says Irwin, who joined the company in 2019. “Cohen said the only company in the world that could make his music into dance would be us.”
And of course, the Montreal connection went deep, as Cohen’s beloved hometown. In fact, BJM debuted Dance Me to mark that city’s 375th anniversary celebrations in 2017.
Of course bringing the piece back on the road has brought with it the usual pummelling physical demands for a company known for pushing movement to its virtuosic limits; Dance Me is filled with dazzling lifts, dizzying turns, and writhing ensemble work.
These are elite athletes, and their routines on tour reflect that.
For Calderon, whose background spans not only the rigorous ballet of the famed National School of Dance in Havana, but martial arts and Olympic-level gymnastics, the physical routine is feeling familiar again. “I like to run, I love to bike, I love to do weights–yes, I mix a lot of types of training into this to keep my body in condition,” he says.
“A lot of the dancers like cross-training because it helps what we do in the studio and on stage, so we all have many different methods,” Irwin adds. “Some of us go to hotel gyms; a lot of us jump rope and swim. Sometimes it’s specific to us: for me, I have to make sure what I’m eating nutritionally is the same as what I’m eating at home.”
With a large European tour planned for this fall, BJM is finding its groove again. And, just as before the pandemic, Dance Me is drawing packed houses of audiences who span music and dance fans, and receiving a warmer reception than it did even before the pandemic. Cohen is a beloved Canadian icon, but so is BJM.
“He is an iconic person who everyone knows around the world,” Calderon says. “In some ways, it’s like we’re dancing with a great artist.”
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