La suite canadienne

What is artistic research really all about? Suite canadienne follows a group of dancers, directed by the artist Adam Kinner, who seek to re-write a foundational ballet, Suite canadienne, by Ludmilla Chiriaeff. The original piece was set in the colonial origins of Quebec and dwelled on this period through movement. In the present, Kinner and his team seek to explore the historical importance of this piece and the figure of Chiriaeff, the godmother of ballet in Quebec. The material is thorny: a little nostalgia for colonial times complicates these lessons on a supposedly minor aspect of history, regarding French culture in the country. The group throws itself into approaching this piece every way possible: how to dress their bodies, how to disassemble movements, how to think about yourself alongside the others in the research space. Their bodies are disobedient and they swap round pieces of costume which might belong to one or other binary gender identity in each scene. Their on-going experiments with movement and materials (light, voices and fabrics) reveal Chiriaeff’s life and times. Exile, dance routines for public television, dance schools for orphaned children, ideas on the position that Quebec should hold in the cultural history of its country. La suite canadienne is a film about process, about the time it takes to understand and re-write a voluntarily performance-based dimension of history, recovered from the present day. Filmed during the first years of the pandemic, the film secretly explores other matters: what happens to the assembled bodies when the possibility of meeting and working together in the space are limited, how can history be perceived when time is always about to be put on hold. 
 
Lucía Salas