GRAND PONEY
CONTEMPORARY DANCE
Grand Poney is an interdisciplinary company established in Montreal by founder Jacques Poulin-Denis in 2009. The company devises a hybrid and collaborative process based on choreographic abstraction, musical composition and theatrical dramaturgy. It draws its narrative from the infinite traits of the human existence: our physical and psychic states, our impulses and principles and our relationship to others and to ourselves. Grand Poney consistently utilizes a measure of unfeasibility to bridge the imaginary to the obvious.
NEWS
SHOWS AVAILABLE
ON / OFF - All ages + Teenagers/school - 12 to 17
SYNOPSIS - ON / OFF - 60-90 min.
Creation 2021 / 5 performers / 45 min. / Capacity 400
ON / OFF is a dance work designed for teenagers and adults where five dancers perform on an unusual and wondrous machine: an oversized treadmill. On this rolling and confined surface, movement is restrained and ecstatic, exhilarated and acrobatic. At times in group or alone, the performers address the themes of identity, self-fulfillment, determination, coexistence, freedom, exhaustion and the unending feelings and sensations that makeup the complexity of life. The treadmill is a meeting place where the characters seek to understand their place in the world. Sometimes at its mercy, sometimes in control of this intriguing, unpredictable and mobilizing machine, the dancers play with time. They suspend actions in space in order to dig out the details of gestures, questions and interactions. The machine becomes a metaphor for the passage from childhood to adulthood. It is the path that we choose to travel and the life that we learn to tame.
PUNCH LINE
SYNOPSIS - PUNCH LINE
Creation 2021 / 1 soloist / 55 min.
Punch Line, a solo work by Jacques Poulin-Denis, borrows as much from the comedic style of a one man show as it does from the intimacy and depth of a confession. In the guise of an artist talk, Jacques Poulin-Denis shares his takes on life and loses himself in thought. Through stories and anecdotes filled with joyful irony, insight and humour, he reveals himself. Characters emerge from this flow of ideas, embodying the multiplicity of our existence, the many avatars that compose us and the at times absurd strategies we use to hold our contradictions together. Treading the thin line that separates reality from fiction, Jacques materializes our inner monologues into sensory experiences, both subtle and intense. He is a transmitter of words, thoughts and gestures.
Punch Line is, of course, the culmination of a joke. In very few words, they create a situation that we subscribe to, accepting any turn of events, no matter how unreal. Punch Line is a salute to the imagination of both artist and spectator, to our need to create and believe in fiction, and to disguise reality to make it more palatable.
ON / OFF | SITE GENERIC
SYNOPSIS - ON / OFF OUTDOOR
ON / OFF is a dance work designed for teenagers
and adults where a quatuor of dancers performs on
an unusual and wondrous machine: an oversized
treadmill.
On this rolling and confining surface, physical
movement is both restrained and ecstatic, exhilarated
and acrobatic. Together and alone, the performers
address themes such as identity, self fulfillment,
determination, coexistence, freedom, exhaustion and
the unending feelings and sensations that makeup
the complexity of life. The treadmill is a meeting place
where the characters seek to understand their place
in the world. Sometimes at the mercy, sometimes
in control of this intriguing, unpredictable and
mobilizing machine, they play with time and suspend
actions in space in order to dig out the details of
gestures, questions and interactions. The forever
forward moving device becomes a metaphor for the
passage from childhood to adulthood. It is the path
that we choose to travel and the life that we learn
to tame.