Dancemakers Interviews for Serge Bennathan's Chronicles of a Simple Life: Serge Bennathan

Dancemakers/Dance Collection Danse

Research project celebrating Dancemakers 50th anniversary

Interviews with original cast members of Serge Bennathan's "Chronicles of a Simple Life" (1993)

DANCEMAKERS: CHRONICLES OF A SIMPLE LIFE RESEARCH PROJECT

SERGE BENNATHAN April 22, 2024

Interviewed by Lucy Rupert via Zoom

LR: I’ll just give you a little bit about why I wanted to write about your work and Chronicles of a Simple Life. I saw Chronicles when I was in 2nd year at the University of Waterloo in the Dance program and the company came and performed. It was a very profound experience for me because I never, for one, seen death and grief presented in a very humanistic way – always opera, ballet, very dramatic. I had lost my mother just a few years before seeing Chronicles. It was cathartic. I also felt that I saw someplace that I could dance. I was not a ballet person, but I had taken only ballet until I went to university. Chronicles was the first time I saw on a stage “maybe one day it could me.” This work influenced everything that came after for me.

I find your work incredibly inspiring and your voice is missed in the Toronto landscape, and I don’t want people to forget it. 

SERGE: Thank you so much for the work because it was something that was very deeply me, this creation. It is good to hear that someone, after all these years, went through a window with it. It opened something. Thank you for that.

LUCY: Thank you for creating the window.

SERGE: It’s so funny …you say I’m missed in Toronto…but well I’m touched because sometimes me and Toronto…besides the love I had for the dancers, it was this group of dancers that didn’t change that much of the 16 years I led the company. People stayed a long time. And sometimes I feel erased a bit, in Toronto. I really feel that we created an impact in Toronto. I say this very humbly. It was a special group.

LR: I could get very emotional about that, but I won’t, not yet anyway. I have some general questions but really go wherever you want to go in talking about this work. I know there’s been a lot said about what inspired Chronicles – do you have any reflections on it now, all these years later? Do you have a different sense now of why this work came out of you with all these beautiful dancers?

SERGE: I feel about the piece like I felt when I created it, to be honest. The piece I created because a very close person to me died of AIDS, and because of this closeness and the look it forced me to have on this tragedy that destroyed a full generation in dance, and all artists. Seeing this person I loved so much go through the horrible times that it was at that time – we forget that there was no cure then– it was so discriminatory, the disease, the suffering was terrible. The vision of people. It was really horrendous. I wanted to honour the life and courage of this person and through this person the millions of people who wen through it, who suffered not just the disease, but also the look of society on them. Way, way before COVID – we forget somewhat now how it was truly, truly a plague. I wanted to honour the life of this person and through him all the people who suffered. Their courage. The absolute courage. My friend was so generous in his turmoil. It was incredible.

Giving a sense of hope – but there wasn’t so much hope back then. I wanted to give more than hope. Honour.

LR: Did your friend know you were making the piece or did they pass away before?

SERGE: He passed away. We were on tour and he was living in Cannes and we toured there. I saw him there one month before his death. We knew it was coming. Each time I saw him, the diminishing of the person. It was extraordinary – he was so weak, but he still came to see the show we were touring.

This person was a true friend. It is intimate. I would lift him up from the chair, carry him.  

It’s not that I thought I would make a piece – you have first to go through your own feelings when someone dies. I knew when I left him that time, it was a question of days, weeks at most. I had to settle for a few months after he passed….and then I started to realize the proportion – that it was incredible….and then you get a bit angry. From this anger you want to create a monument to this person. To these people. That was it.

The piece came from that. It was no effort – the piece came out of me. After it was done, I felt a connection to him through it.  A true connection, not just thinking of him.

After, of course, you create a piece, you have all the work you do with the dancers, we show them the path, but let them discover the path. I feel that the dancers had to find it in themselves….because the piece was quite hard, physically….so they had to find the place of courage themselves. Not to compare with the courage of my friend, but courage is courage and when you try to find a place of courage, to be true to something as an artist, it’s a journey. It was a big part of the journey of Chronicles and of all the work we created together after.

They had to find this place of courage and go and let their spirit drive the physical.

LR:  That reminds me of something Marie-Josée said when I interviewed her. We talked for a long time about what we thought made your voice as a choreographer, and frankly what I miss in the Toronto dance landscape now:  somehow you create a very, very physical, very demanding style and use of weight in the movement and despite all the technical challenges, everybody is so incredibly human.  I interviewed Marie-Josée in a café and she kept getting up and showing me movements from Chronicles. Full bodied. And no one in the café blinked an eye at us.

Maybe the idea of the courage has something to do with why we feel your work as an audience. While you’re creating the physical environment, the soulful environmental where you have to find the courage to the very challenging things – I don’t think there’s very many people in Toronto now who perform your work. I think they would keel over – 

SERGE: That was the work, and I would say as a creator I really wanted that people don’t connect with the dancer on stage but that the dancer conveys a series of images that get in you. So, you connect with the person on stage. They are in front of you and talk to you. The dancer is “doing something”, they are talking to you as an audience.

That’s the work to be done.

We go back to courage because to do this you have to be courageous. It makes you extremely vulnerable to be strong. To be powerful you have to be in a very fragile place because you get naked. It’s just raw power of you inside that is talking.

The dancers have to go there.

My role was to guide them there. Sometimes I saw dancers that didn’t want to go there – not with the company but other places I created. I could see the person saying, “no, no, no, no, I don’t want to go there.”

LR: Do you have thoughts about ways you can help people come out if they are too scared?

SERGE: This is what I always thought is part of my job as a choreographer. A choreographer is not just to tell you “do this, do that”. It is to guide you to be in the mental space that you feel safe to do things that are dangerous.

There is a way but it’s part of the work.

LR: I appreciate you saying that because the challenge of my career has been this massive feeling that I’m supposed to be dancing, I’m supposed to be going on stage and opening myself up. It is so scary. But it’s heartening to hear you speak about it. Today was a very good for me to hear it.

SERGE: When I go to see dance, I can tell if the choreographer did their work, truly, with the dancers. Did the choreographer bring the dancers to the piece? And vice versa. I think sometimes I don’t feel the dancers were truly guided by the choreographer, but sometimes the dancers are extraordinary because the choreographer is not the thing you see on the stage …there is what we see and what we witness.

LR: Do you have any memorable moments from the creative process of Chronicles?

SERGE: To be honest, I couldn’t tell you a thing … when I think about the dancers, I feel the work we did. The only thing that truly interests me is the journey we had. 

LR: Marie-Josée couldn’t remember the process but she could remember the feeling and certain performances. I don’t know what that says but it is really interesting. 

SERGE: Well, first of all, what it says is that we created this work over 30 years ago.

(LUCY AND SERGE LAUGH)

And since then, everybody went a long way. Everybody lived so many years of their life….but I can remember the breath of the piece. I can remember the dancers going through this…like crossing a sea, a tempest, and then at the end the solo that Carolyn had to do. She had another 8 minutes after the tempest and you can’t let go.

This is a piece in which you never can let go.

That’s what I remember.

LR: What I’m trying to understand as I continue to dance is this craving I have. I want to flow, but most really good choreography never lets you get into a flow, because in a truly flowy state, you’ve let go. To keep going, to keep speaking to the audience you have to hold on all the way through.

SERGE: When it’s like this, this deep, it can be another flow that you hang onto. The flow of your courage, the flow of staying present, moment after moment. That’s the thing.

LR: A different kind of flow.

SERGE: Exactly. All these works like Chronicles– there are no counts. It’s all on the flow of the dancers, it goes here, we shift, it goes there. You have to be in your own flow.

The work we have to do is different than if there were counts. That’s why I brought voice work into the company because voice work makes you go down. The dancing in the company had to be visceral. You have to feel the trembling of the energy in a visceral path. That’s why sometimes it’s difficult to speak about the work.

Of course, at the beginning it’s a challenge, one obstacle after another. How do you get where it’s part of you and you trust yourself to go. Once we arrive to put it on stage – it’s just you.

LR: It must build a lot of trust between you and the dancers. And between the dancers.

SERGE: Exactly! It was difficult to determine who were the right people for the company – to feel who would be up for this journey.

LR: It makes a lot of sense about how absolutely human the choreography is -- you feel it as an audience member and how connected the dancers are.

SERGE: It’s because you had to create that trust. There’s a lot of things in life you say, “I don’t know how I did it”, but in that moment trust was there.

LR: Even if you’re not aware that it’s there, it’s there.

SERGE: Exactly. That was the challenge of being in the company. You have to shift what you thought was a dancer. To keep the physicality and the force and strength.

Maybe when I arrived in Toronto people were not used to me. Toronto, when I arrived, was very anchored in North American modern dance. Dancers had to trust me that this other way of moving was ok. That was the beauty of the company. This powerful trust.

LR: That’s very special.  To have the trust and generosity and courage with one another. We need more examples of that for the art form on a whole in Canada. We need to have some courage and trust one another more.

SERGE: Totally.

LR: Did the way Chronicles was made launch you into a new way of creating?  

SERGE: I think I brought it with me. Because the first piece I did at Dancemakers was a piece I had done in Vancouver. We started to work in January and I had to produce a piece in February at Dancemakers…..so I used this piece that Sylvie Bouchard and Learie McNicholls did in Vancouver with me to start with the company in Toronto. This way of working was there with that piece and from the beginning of my time with Dancemakers. It’s part of all my work, I would say.

I was with Dancemakers 16 years.

You know when the company changed -- in sixteen years maybe two or three times that I chose the wrong person – well not the wrong person but someone who was maybe really willing but couldn’t find a way, you know? It just wouldn’t work out with that person. 

LR: The way of working really crystalized the chemistry of the company. You had people that stayed with you the whole time or close to it?

SERGE: Yes.

LR: That’s amazing.

SERGE: It was amazing. These dancers were my loves. It was very, very, very beautiful.

LR: This is a silly, fashion question – about the shoes in Chronicles?  I guess because back in 1993 I hadn’t seen modern dance done in Doc Martens. That was part of why I felt it was my world. I had those shoes, I wore those shoes. It’s not just Chronicles many of your works. Were the shoes part of a certain aesthetic?

SERGE: Well, Jean Pierre Perrault also used shoes like this at the time, others were using shoes like this. For me the shoes were a mental state.  The form of groundedness – our lives sometimes give us lead shoes and you still have to live full life with these shoes. A mental state, exaggeration, a form of groundedness. As if the ground tried to have you. But then you have the upper body that is constantly elevating itself, reaching out. If we had done the work in bare feet, it would have been a totally different, in terms of contradiction between the down-body and the upper-body. I couldn’t imagine this particular piece otherwise. It’s the only piece I used shoes where I really wanted this contrast. 

And the poster – the dancers leaning, anchored to the ground but also almost floating.

LR: It creates tension visually.

SERGE: Yes! How do you get the strength, the power, the abandon of the upper body to find the path when the lower body is constantly in grand plie, running. Large. There’s a form of ogreness.

In the piece you have to be an ogre of life. Like in German fairy tale.

LR: I love that. An ogre of life. 

SERGE: When you think about people going through illness… they have to be this.

LR: I watched my mother going through 10 years of illness, disfigurement, immense pain. It suddenly makes sense of why Chronicles hit me the way it did. I never broke it down. Not even when I knew I would be writing about the work. The ogre of life, that’s what thing I saw in my mother too. She was a meek person, a lot of the time, a people-pleaser. But as a terminally ill person she did not give up until she really didn’t have a choice anymore. She would have loved to call herself an ogre of life.

I’m very aware that we’ve been talking for a while and you have a million things to do before you leave for France tomorrow.

Is there anything left you’d like to say about Chronicles of a Simple Life or your time at Dancemakers?

SERGE: There were moments at Dancemakers that were hard but I’m so thankful and grateful that I found a place where I could do the work that I wanted to do with the artists that I dreamed to have. So, I’m very proud of all the dancers, all that they did then and what they do now.

LR: And you’re still doing such amazing stuff. You’re choreographing all over and your paintings in exhibit… You’re going to be creating and creating and creating til the end of days.

SERGE: Until my shoes come off.

LR: And then you float away.

SERGE: That’s the beauty. I’m in awe. I have a life that I dreamt of. I live for my work. I ‘ve created in places that are fantastic. The paintings now, it’s another opportunity to live a life of passion. Maybe slowly I stop with dance. I love dance, it’s my life but I never truly saw myself being 80 years old and still creating. Now that I am painting, I understand why. Right now, I do both, but I wouldn’t mind seeing dance diminishing and painting taking over. I am so amazed. Two chances to have two passions in one life.

Meanwhile I choreograph and I paint.

LR: Thank you so much for talking with me. I don’t know if you remember me. I used to take class with dancemakers all the time.

SERGE: Of course I do.

LR:  I’m so glad I moved to Toronto during the time you were there creating and inspiring us all. I loved being part of those classes, and part of the Dancemakers world through them.

Thank you so much. Happy travels, safe travels. 

SERGE: Merci, merci.