Fot. z materiałów Anny Marii Karabeli.
Daniel Léveillé is another star invited to participate in the 12th Body/Mind Festival in Warsaw. The Canadian avantgarde artist of the new wave, who gave up architecture studies for dance, is going to present the final part of his choreographic trilogy for the first time in Poland. Coming after Utopie (1997) and Amour, acide et noix (2001), The Modesty of Icebergs is not only a non-compromising and full of metaphorical beauty performance about the body, but a performance of the body, as it entwines content and form in an unbreakable dancing embrace, exposing and transgressing itself. Daniel Léveillé performed in Poland in 2010 at the Spring Festival in Poznań with one of his first creations – Le Sacre du printemps. With this new show he goes deeper and deeper, exploring his well-known subjects: the desire to confront one’s body with the body of the Other, the mythical relation which steers bodies in space, and tracking movement in its incessant rising and falling tides.
Daniel Léveillé (1952) is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, visual artist and artistic director of Daniel Léveillé Danse.In 1978-1981 he collaborated with Françoise Sullivan, Canadian choreographer, dancer, sculptor and painter. Herartistic vision, extending beyond the traditions of formal dance, played a very important role in Daniel Leveillé’sfuture development as an artist. In his performances he explores the body as a medium, placing it in the spaceof cultural codes and human emotionality. Never reluctant to expose nudity on stage, Leveillé strives to capturethe dialectic of weakness and power contained in the performer’s body movement, and delves into sexuality andrelated narrations, such as love, need for contact, alienation and loneliness. In The Modesty of Icebergs the body isexposed almost as a clinical object – white, dismal, fidgeting. Through repeated identical jumps, identical toneddown movements in clear straight lines, the body reveals its strange and disturbing beauty and fragility. This radicalchoreography of naked bodies, contained in a strictly delimited spatial composition, serves to underscore the bodies’asceticism and undermine voyeuristic temptations.
