The Radiance of Cosmic Love

Re-imagining gesture in the choreography of Clara Furey

Working closely with lighting designer Alexandre Pilon-Guay and composer Tomas Furey, Canadian choreographer Clara Furey approaches choreography as a multi-sensory experience. Her first group piece for seven dancers, “Cosmic Love”, is a whirlwind of colours, bodies and movements that continuously transmute and transform in a vibrant energy field.

Choreographer Clara Furey is also a Paris Conservatory trained musician, who understands the notion of getting ‘plugged into’ and ‘getting lost in’ in the sound – and on stage. In her performances, she utilizes sound to enable the excavation of muted interior landscapes of gestures. Assured with such a concentrated ecology of waiting and tuning, Furey approaches the stage as a tabula rasa where she herself, just as the viewer, is encouraged to dwell in a ‘room of one’s own’. There, the feeling of falling in a hole or deep-diving into the depths of the particular quadrants of the room are met with lingering and ritual biding that might render the unexpected.

Her six dancers explore not how to become one, but rather experiment with how we might find some form of cooperation, community, and refuge in ‘the multitude’.

Furey’s dance practice is equally composed of explorations of sound, deep sensory explorations and blank canvasses for her audience to dive into. What occurs is a total cosmology that can at once be constructed and easily ripped apart. She accomplishes this neither via dreamworld or nightmare, but rather via living waking reveries that we can fully identify with and immerse ourselves in. In this sense, presenting ‘the immersive’ is Furey’s greatest gift as a choreographer: she enables us to share and to immerse ourselves fully into ‘her world’, which always feels like a non-world.

“Cosmic Love” can be taken as a study on the possibility of multiple individuations. Her six dancers explore not how to become one, but rather experiment with how we might find some form of cooperation, community, and refuge in ‘the multitude’. There can be a great comfort in ‘not having to know’ exactly what is washing over our bodies and minds as spectators. Their gestural sculpting of (slow then fast) time could be that of past or future ‘bodies’, culling us into hallucinations or commons we might have once known but cannot name. In looking at Furey’s oeuvre, there is often this feeling of plenitude: we are witnessing, awestruck, the generosity of movement, no matter how minimalistic the movement might appear. The gestures cut air whilst the ground on which the performances are built evaporates into nothingness, then back into something and then back into the black box we first sat down in. These are not dreams or hallucinations, even when her and her dancer’s technical sophistication often make us feel as if they are. Rather, Furey’s works resemble chiaroscuro paintings that are slowly melting, or orchestrations that implode into unsolidified matter.

In “Cosmic Love”, solidarity is being re-figured out and reconsidered.

Furey ventures into explorations of the primordial and into future tense. She is testing those future bodies that could engender a body-knowledge that could inform our present world. Thus, in exploring those lost hieroglyphs of language-movement in itself and between ‘us’ , we might again find ways to reconstitute the basic motor of life, energy, and its sway. In “Cosmic Love”, Furey does not mimic the political order of the day that defines ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’ through various instrumental lenses. Instead, here, solidarity is being reconfigured and reconsidered. Furey’s entities – like celestial planets – seem to be renegotiating the ‘us’, and how we can even be an ‘us’. “Cosmic Love” is a performance, which goes beyond the boundaries of entertainment to produce the most basic of human principles and explorations. The actions on stage explore manners and ways to create energy, to test fate and to produce new human fuels. There is a critical attempt at rethinking the methods of production and at reconsidering our relationship to others, human and non-human, who we must begin to consider as part of our everyday world of gesture, movement, thought, and living. T

“Cosmic Love” © Mathieu Verreault