Louise Lecavalier - by Mj Thompson (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first critical study of punk ballet icon Louise Lecavalier, principal dancer with Montreal-based company La La La Human Steps from 1981-1999, and single most iconic dancer of her generation.

Book Synopsis

As principal dancer with Montréal-based company La La La Human Steps, Louise Lecavalier was among the most iconic dancers of her generation: strong, muscled, androgynous, punk. Moving with spectacular speed, precision and an athletic physicality, her commitment to dancing would ultimately transform the potential of what bodies within Western concert dance could do.

Drawing on extensive oral history accounts and archival material, the book follows Lecavalier's impact on the evolving aesthetic of La La La Human Steps, via the development of its early repertoire, and offers the first sustained account of her 1982 solo Non, Non, Non, je ne suis pas Mary Poppins. More, it tracks diverse influences and sources for the repertoire, complicating understandings of nationalism in Québec, while marking the significance of the collective in generating new aesthetics. What emerges is a portrait of the dancer as artist, icon, labourer and mover of cultural discourse.
Featuring an expansive set of photos and ephemera, including performance documentation by photographer/activist Linda Dawn Hammond, production images by choreographer Édouard Lock and street photography by key players in the 1980s Montréal scene, this study offers a critical and celebratory appraisal of Lecavalier's unique contribution and the role of the dancer more broadly as a producer of culture.

Review Quotes

"[Lecavalier's] extreme dance, filled with a fiery energy, caught the imagination of a whole generation." --New York Live Arts

"Louise LeCavalier's transformative work with La La Human Steps (1981-95) inspired fantastically exciting and innovative dancing and Thompson's study of Lecavalier's work inspires new trajectories for dance history. Drawing on urban studies, poststructuralist French theory, feminist politics and phenomenology, Thompson gives us a vivid portrait of a staggeringly resilient artist. Lecavalier emerges here as an insightful commentator on her life and art and, most crucially, as a brilliant resourceful dancer for more than four decades. Thompson's study, like Lecavalier's dancing, revels in its own capacious expenditure, inviting us to expand dance history's usual discussions of technique and beauty to consider urban life, sweat, love and money. If this is the 'new' dance history, I am all for it." --Peggy Phelan, Ann O'Day Maples Professor of the Arts and Professor of English, Stanford University, USA

"MJ Thompson has crafted an extraordinary rendering of an exquisite artist, placing the achievement of Louise Lecavalier within contexts that expand the reach of theatrical dance. Moving deftly through a stunning, precisely-chosen array of contemporary analytic perspectives, Thompson demonstrates how a dance artist's career manifests powerful ways to move the world through radical gestures of performance." --Thomas F. DeFrantz, Director of SLIPPAGE: PerformanceCultureTechnology

About the Author

MJ Thompson is Associate Professor at Concordia University, Canada. She has written for a wide variety of publications, including Ballettanz, Border Crossings, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, Dance Current, Dance Ink, Dance Magazine, The Drama Review, Women and Performance and more. Her academic work is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada and her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including Performance Studies Canada (2017). More recently, she received the National Park Service Arts and Sciences Residency (Cape Cod National Seashore) where she worked on a long-form essay about the body in landscape.