Mixed Media

Book

Louise Lecavalier

Long anticipated, Canadian scholar MJ Thompson’s study of a luminous contemporary dancer, Louise Lecavalier: Dance, Labour, Culture, is finally available from Bloomsbury Press.

In this hybrid work of oral histories, a zine-like archive of images, and academic analysis,Thompson explores how Lecavalier and the early work of Édouard Lock and La La La Human Steps challenged ideas about what dance was and how to do it. With her fierce physicality and restless questioning of social and artistic codes, Lecavalier gained fame early in collaboration with Lock and, later, music icons Frank Zappa and David Bowie, before developing her current career as a soloist and choreographer. Throughout the book, Thompson draws lines between the personal and the political, between media perceptions and practical recollection, sometimes stretching intertextuality to the max, as in her discussion of Africanist aesthetics in Quebecois dance, or Lecavalier as cyborg.

For dance aficionados, Thompson’s analysis of movement, how and why Lecavalier and company developed the off-axis, speedy aesthetic of early La La La works like Human Sex (1985), is simply fascinating. As are her discussions of culture and gender, visual perception, virtuosity, and dance history, among many other things. Always, Thompson returns to the woman and artist, seeking to understand Lecavalier’s lengthy and complex relationship to dance performance.

This is an intellectually energetic look at what makes Lecavalier the superstar she is. It’s also more: an interrogation of how the dancer and the dance can embody a multitude of ideas about identity, labour and power.

Kathleen Smith

MJ Thompson: Louise Lecavalier: Dance, Labor, Culture; www.bloomsbury.com