NEW ARTIST AT THE AGENCY !
PARTS+LABOUR
CONTEMPORARY DANCE
Co-choreographers Emily Gualtieri and David Albert-Toth have built PARTS+LABOUR into a bold and rising voice in contemporary dance. Since 2011, they have created works that blur the lines between script and spontaneity, merging the personal, the poetic, and the political. Inspired by literature, mythology, and philosophy, their artistic ethos embraces tension over resolution, embracing the collision of divergent ideas and visions to generate powerful narratives about community, solitude, and collective resilience. Their collaboration is rooted in difference, care, and shared vision. Together, they have developed a choreographic signature grounded in friction, mutual respect, and the urgent need to confront the world as it is.
NEWS
SHOWS AVAILABLE
LABOUR
%20%20_%20%20%C2%A9%20Robin%20Pineda%20Gould%20(David%20Albert-Toth)_edi.jpg)
À bout de bras
LABOUR
SUMMARY - LABOUR
2026 | 5 artists on stage | 60 min.
LABOUR is a creation that embraces a minimalist and repetitive physicality. Raw, sweaty, visceral, and absurd, it rejects aesthetic politeness and imagines a shared power, both intimate and collective, rooted in a plurality of femme perspectives. The piece puts at the forefront womxn’s labour and the radical forces that build, sustain, reimagine and transform. Through unstable and yet simple rhythms, it turns the body into a site of metamorphosis, confronting today’s fragmented realities with gestures of resistance, care, and collective force.
In a discipline obsessed with control, LABOUR asserts that mastery and mess coexist. Front-facing, the work is both confrontational and welcoming. Its accumulation links us to each performer, making us witnesses and accomplices. The hypnotic rhythm distorts time, drawing us into a cadence that is precise yet elusive. The work opens space for reflection, recognition, and appreciation of dance as embodied labour and shared joy, while engaging with broader questions of effort and the real labour of bodies on and off stage.
À BOUT DE BRAS
SUMMARY - LABOUR
2022 | 1 artist on stage | 60 min.
À bout de bras - A Modern-Day Tantalus
In this powerful and theatrical solo, David Albert-Toth explores our innermost paradoxes: our thirst for solitude flirts with our fear of being alone, and our infinite desires remain eternally unfulfilled.
Co-choreographed with, and directed by Emily Gualtieri, David is in turn dancer, actor, and magician: a self-undermining virtuoso. The choreographic duo summons the myth of Tantalus and revisits it with the complicity of playwright Étienne Lepage. On stage, David speaks to us with irreverent humour about the absurdity of our primal desires, and of the unspeakable things we are ready to do to satisfy them. He taps deeply into his uncommon, writhing physicality, through trial and error, crystallizing into form and force in fleeting moments. The work is unpredictable, imbued with ambivalent and conflicting desires. As the body shifts through states playing against the duo’s intricate choreographic writing, the piece invokes a global experience of vulnerability, scrutinizing the modern-day individual and, by extension, each one of us.