Artist Angela Laurier, who dazzled Quebec with her contortions, acrobatics, and aerial rope choreographies during the very early days of Cirque du Soleil, passed away last week at the age of 62. According to her peers, she was a pioneering artist who paved important ways for creative and auteur circus, for contortion, and for a certain political perspective within and on circus arts. Memories.
“She had a strong and beautiful presence,” notes Gilles Ste-Croix, co-founder of Cirque du Soleil. In 1988, in the show
“She broke the mold of contortion,” says director Alice Ronfard, “traditionally performed by very young girls. She transformed it into a tool of sensuality and politics, with her screaming body, her audacity, her rebelliousness, her punk side.”
Making Contortion Imaginable
Born into the performing arts, a member of the Laurier tribe, composed of nine children including her actress sisters Charlotte and Lucie, Angela Laurier was trained in gymnastics from a very young age.
Competitions, musical theater, and filming of the cult TV series Pop citrouille were part of her daily youth. Then, “she showed up at the embryonic circus school, at the time on Papineau Street,” where she worked with Guy Caron, recalls Gilles Ste-Croix.
Her circus debut followed, first in Belgium in 1984, before returning the following year for Cirque du Soleil. She was 22 years old. She performed during these mythical years, until 1988.
“Already, she challenged the issues of making profits through performance,” notes Alice Ronfard. “She wanted to be involved in human-centered projects. She had a big mouth, a singular madness that belonged only to her. And they shut her down. They broke her. It’s disheartening.”
Jinny Jacinto and Ms. Chassé, who were part of the subsequent contortionist quartet at Cirque du Soleil, starting with Nouvelle Expérience, saw their childhood hearts touched by Angela Laurier. “She had her arms wide open, and said, ‘You are next,’ recounts Ms. Jacinto. It was she who made it imaginable for me to be a contortionist.”
Being Broken
Angela Laurier then embodied Puck in Robert Lepage’s staged vision of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the turn of the 2000s, she began to develop her own writing for the body and the stage.
The show Mon grand frère (My Big Brother), directed by Michel Dallaire in 1999, would be followed by half a dozen creations. These circus autofictions, autobiographies narrated with great emphasis on the body or very personal documentaries, would be performed regularly in France, and a little less in Quebec.
Also at the turn of the 2000s, she moved to France, where creative circus is more funded, “but where hierarchies are much harsher,” laments Alice Ronfard. “But what did she go there for? She ended up being isolated there.”
She began a fruitful collaboration with choreographer François Verret, connected with contemporary circus artists in France, and became rarer in Quebec. In 2010, we saw J’aimerais pouvoir rire (I Wish I Could Laugh) here, directed by Lucie Laurier, performed with her brother Dominique, who suffered from schizophrenia.
Déversoir, seen at La Chapelle theater in 2009, is also a show in this lineage. “I broke myself enough,” the artist had then told Le Devoir to present this intimate show about the effect of her father’s depression, treated with electroshocks.
In 2012, she created L’Angela bête (The Angela Beast) at Les Subsistances in Lyon, a touring, always autobiographical show, mixing circus, theater, singing, and rock’n’roll. “Angela, Angela, you still have beautiful remnants to serve before you’re done,” she chanted there.
She also participated in cultural activities for reintegration and in correctional facilities.
“It’s her audacity that I will keep within me,” concludes Alice Ronfard. “When I feel like breaking everything, she’s who I think of, and who I will think of. She had a singular madness, a joy for life through laughter, and at the same time, it’s peculiar, an inability to soothe her own soul.”
Actress Lucie Laurier shared the pain of her grief on Facebook. “We surround our mother, who has been tested too many times, with all our love,” she wrote.
https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/813314/mort-angela-laurier-contorsionniste