incendie
Presented by Mosaic Dance Company
Jan. 25-26, 2025 | LSPU Hall
Reviewed by Nicole Haldoupis
If you were in the audience at the LSPU Hall on January 25th, 2025, you may have heard the breath of the dancers onstage during the performance of incendie, featuring choreography by Vanessa Warren, Kathleen O’Grady, and Katy Noftall. You may have noticed the breath and then maybe doubted yourself for noticing it, or maybe you wondered if the dancers onstage were just tired from working hard, trying to catch their breath like trying to catch smoke dissipating in a room from a just-blown-out candle. But then the breath continues throughout, becomes more obvious, seems intentional. As the narrative of incendie reveals itself onstage, so, too does the purposeful breath of the dancers.
The show evokes feelings of anxiety and wrestling with the stories that you tell yourself. Like trying to catch your breath or contain a fire. The chorus of dancers and their confident lines, the positions of their bodies, their technique, body awareness, and intentional focus of their eyes ensure the audience is not distracted from the themes of the show.
The show is set to smooth, dreamy songs, often piano-heavy, and images of fire, heat, embers, and smoke are emulated through the dancers. The dancers’ arms like tendrils, like flames licking the air in unison. Sometimes a raging bonfire and sometimes a single flame flickering alone. Dancers support and comfort each other, crossing the stage in pairs in the third movement, and the fifth movement begins with the dancers lining up two by two—a hard contrast to the fluidity of earlier movements. The sixth movement features percussion via the dancers clapping the floor and culminates in one dancer being boxed in by the chorus of dancers—a single flame contained. The dancers squared off in a box that changes into a single line rotating around the stage, and two dancers reach for each other through the fence of bodies, a barrier that they can’t seem to breach as they struggle for connection.
After the intermission, I really began to feel the narrative of the show come through. The spoken parts start, with one dancer reading lines from a notebook as the others take shape onstage. There is no music, so the audience can really focus on the movement and the story being told. Themes of melting and shape shifting, of lulling each other to sleep. One dancer taps each of the others and they transform upon their touch, like a flame being snuffed out and relit.
The percussion starts again, but this time through heels stomping on the stage, pounding on the ground with fists, as well as pounding on the dancers’ own chests and thighs. The dancer in charge swaps out with another, who uses snapping to ignite the others to move into different positions. The chorus of dancers eventually snaps back, creating a feeling of isolation and confrontation with the singled-out soloist. The theme of isolation continues as the dancers warm themselves, alone but together, rubbing their palms and arms and legs. Candles are brought onto the stage and placed in a line along the front, then bundled into the front corners. The chorus congregates in a disjointed circle, holding the candles around the speaker at the centre of the stage, listening and warming and smouldering together.
Nicole Haldoupis is from Toronto and lives in St. John’s, NL. Her first book, Tiny Ruins (Radiant Press, 2020), was shortlisted for four Saskatchewan Book Awards and the Bressani Literary Prize. She’s a PhD student at Memorial University, creative writing instructor at the College of the North Atlantic, and managing editor of Paragon Press.
January, 2025