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Bodies of Uncharted Ice

In 2001 French-Canadian choreographer Daniel Léveillé asked his dancers to take their clothes off. For the ten years prior to this pivotal request, Léveillé’s pieces were costumed, but in the middle of the creation process for Amour, acide et noix, Léveillé made a decision, choosing to present nudity ‘as the only true alternative to the reading of the body, frank and free of false modesty’ (Léveillé 2012). The dancers’ lack of clothing prompted a critic from the Toronto Globe and Mail to comment that ‘the dancers are not men and women, but microcosms for humanity as a whole’ (Citron 2004). Buoyed by the scope for creative, analytical and critical response, Léveillé has continued to create dances to be performed in the nude ever since. In 2004 Léveillé premiered La pudeur des icebergs [The modesty of icebergs], a contemporary dance piece for six performers – four men and two women – that equates icebergs with the simultaneous remoteness and vulnerability of the human body. Like its predecessor, La pudeur is performed in the nude, and critics once more perceived the nakedness of the dancers’ bodies as a metaphor, praising them as ‘clean slates for our projected visions’ (Jowitt 2008: 1). Of particular interest for this article is the juxtaposition of the naked body with the iceberg. In La pudeur icebergs are implied as cool, slippery Postmodern subject– objects that evade collection (see Clifford 1988, discussed below) and posit human presence and interaction as entirely insignificant. My research, ‘Choreographing the North’, takes as its premise the notion of the ‘body as centre of analysis’, drawn from cultural anthropologist Thomas Csordas’s essay ‘Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology’ (1990), and applies it to concert dance practice. My project seeks to elaborate patterns and anomalies within and across contemporary dance works that take the North or aspects of northern culture, flora or fauna as their inspiration to articulate the relationship between the romanticized North and the compromised North. This project advocates the importance of understanding how culture is mobilized through dance and how dance responds to culture through the medium of the sentient, acculturated body. Ultimately this project asks what it means to identify with ‘northern’ themes; how ‘northernness’ relates to identity and the performance of place; the degree to which narrative geographies correspond with corporeal, embodied topography; and whether connections exist between physical and metaphysical colonization. Through repeated viewing of La pudeur, and analysis of secondary source material pertaining to Léveillé and his oeuvre and also to icebergs as they figure in cultural theory and popular culture, I am examining the extent to which La pudeur extends, reinforces and contradicts the iceberg as trope. The dancers in La pudeur enter and exit the stage naked. There is no disrobing or partial nudity; nudity is rather a fact, without beginning or end. There are no sets, and the piece’s score is comprised of fragments of Chopin’s Preludes, Opus 28, that are frequently very quiet and often purely incidental. The lighting is minimal, casting the dancers in a cool, grey light that neither flatters nor enhances but simply shows the contours of their bodies in clear relief. The dancers themselves look directly at the audience, entirely present and unapologetic. Bodies of Uncharted Ice Daniel Léveillé’s La pudeur des icebergs