Édouard Lock

Édouard Lock (born March 3, 1954 in Morocco) is a Canadian dance choreographer and the founder of the Canadian dance group, La La La Human Steps.

History

In 1957, Édouard Lock's parents moved to Montreal, where he studied film and literature at Concordia University. He began his choreographic career at the age of 20, creating works from 1974 to 1979 for a variety of Canadian dance companies and institutions. In February 1979 the New York Times reviewed his appearance on stage together with Martine Epoque:

"Something is happening, but one is never sure what. The atmosphere is palpable in Mr. Lock's 'Remous,' with women stretching their white skirts against the light, murmured names and a dreamy partial striptease atop a table."[1]

He formed La La La Human Steps in 1980, and began choreographing full-length works, which soon attracted international attention. Since 1985, each work for La La La has toured internationally for up to two years. The company was disbanded in September 2015 owing to financial difficulties.[2]

He founded Lock Danseurs, the precursor of La La La Human Steps, in 1980, and started to work with dancer Louise Lecavalier, his muse and close collaborator for 18 years. In 1980 Lock's Lily Marlène dans la jungle was presented at Montreal's Théâtre l'Eskabel, then at The Kitchen in New York. The following year, he won the Jean A. Chalmers Award for choreography for Oranges, and was honoured with the same award again in 2001.

In 1985, Human Sex established Édouard Lock's international reputation as one of the great choreographers, and in 1986 it earned him a Bessie Award from New York's contemporary dance professionals.

Lock has received commissions from the Dutch National Ballet, the Nederlands Dans Theatre, Montreal's Grands Ballets Canadiens and the Opéra de Paris.

In 2001, he was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec and an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Choreographic style

Reviewers in Montreal dailies described Édouard Lock's first works as almost cartoon-like, identifying his style as urban in nature, his choreographies characterized by stop-start movements restricted by the space available to the dancers. His style then began to concretize with Human Sex, which combined high-energy performance with precise gestures, culminating in an integration of dance, sport, rock and cinema. In New Demons, film projection became part of the dance, with the repeated image of a continually falling body. In Infante, c’est destroy, the film-related work approached the realm of symbolic analysis.

In 1988, Lock drew upon the vocabulary of classical dance for the first time in his career as part of a commission for the Dutch National Ballet. His artistic partnership with dancer Louise Lecavalier continued until 1998, with her horizontal twisting leaps becoming an iconic feature of their collaboration. Since 2001, Lock has required his classically trained dancers to undergo sports training.

Édouard Lock's works feature modified ballet, a melding of choreography, music and film, as well as multiple lighting changes that create a distorted sense of the perception of the body. Sexual ambiguity is another ongoing thread, and in Human Sex he was already reversing the expected roles, with female dancers raising their male partners into the air and Louise Lecavalier, with her androgynous body, wearing a tutu and false moustache. In a general sense, Lock's style has been based since the mid-80's on the pointe work of his female dancers (plus the male ones since Amelia and Amjad) who, spun by other dancers, perform extremely fast pirouettes and borrow from various figures in the vocabulary of classical dance.

Cinema

Édouard Lock's works have appeared on film. 1987's La La La Human Sex duo no 1, directed by Bernhard Hébert and starring Louise Lecavalier and Marc Béland, is a short black-and-white film which won six international prizes including one from the Festival international du film sur l'art de Montréal. Also directed by Bernhard Hébert, Le petit musée de Velasquez (1994), is a free adaptation of eight choreographed pieces from Infante, c’est destroy. Actress Markita Boies appears alongside the La La La Human Steps dancers in this colour feature filmm which blends contemporary dance with the world of the great Spanish Baroque painter Diego Velázquez.

The film adaptation of Amelia, directed by Lock himself, received its American premiere at the TriBeCa Film Festival in 2004, and its European premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. It was honoured at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Festival de la Rose d'Or in Switzerland, and at the Prague International Film Festival. Amelia also won the Jury Award in all categories at the Banff World Television Festival, as well as two Gemini Awards for Best Performing Arts Direction and Editing as well as two I.C.E. awards for best photography and best editing.

Collaborations

Édouard Lock has also worked with several figures in the world of music. He created a choreographed event with David Bowie and Louise Lecavalier as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, filmed by video artist Nam June Paik, then continued his collaboration with Bowie in 1990 as creator and art director of his Sound + Vision world tour. In 1992. he worked with Frank Zappa on the performance of Yellow Shark, alongside the Ensemble Modern, the Frankfurt Alte Oper, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Konzerthaus. He also commishioned works from and colllborated with Iggy Pop, Einstürzende Neubauten (Blixa Bargeld, Marc Chung, F. M. Einheit), Shellac of North America (Steve Albini), Skinny Puppy, My Bloody Valentine (Kevin Shields) David Van Tiegham, West India Company (Stephen Luscombe, Pandit Dinesh). He has also worked with American composer and Pulitzer Award winner David Lang for Salt (1997) and Amelia (2002) and with British composer Gavin Bryars, for 2, Amjad, and New Work.

Works

Awards

References

  1. ↑ This is Lock's first mentioning in the Times, as member of Le Groupe Nouvelle Aire who made their New York debut in 1978. Jennifer Dunning: Groupe Nouvelle Aire at Riverside Church, New York Times, 9 February 1979, pg. C31
  2. ↑ Swoboda, Victor (2 September 2015). "La La La Human Steps is no more, Édouard Lock announces". Montreal Gazette. Retrieved 3 September 2015.
  3. ↑ "Recipients of the 2010 Governor General's Performing Arts Awards Announced". Press release. Ottawa: CNW Group. 23 February 2010. Retrieved 8 August 2012.
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