TALES OF LOHR: LE PATIN LIBRE'S "CARTE BLANCHE" AT THE UPMC RINK AT PPG PLACE
Thoughts on the Montreal ice dance troupe's latest; plus, "This Week in Warhol" gives good oral
When most people hear the phrase “ice dancing,” they probably think of the iteration customarily featured in the Winter Olympics: Couples in typical spangly figure-skating attire, gliding in ballroom formations to Johann Strauss or Andrea Bocelli. Le Patin Libre has made it their mission to explode the concept of ice dancing by pairing the skate with the bolder, more abstract and exploratory techniques of contemporary dance. Founded in Montreal by veteran competitive and pro skater Alexandre Hamel, the core quintet of the troupe, partnering with the Pittsburgh Dance Council, brought the world premiere of their new program “Carte Blanche” to Pittsburgh for a trio of shows this past week. Presented at the city’s downtown skating rink in the plaza of PPG Place, the castle-like, wholly glass-paneled towers provided a pleasingly paradoxical winter fantasy backdrop for an excursion into the risk-reaching future of movement on ice.
The 40-minute program commences in silence, Hamel and fellow skaters Samory Ba, Jasmin Boivin, and Taylor Dilley gliding in stoic, purposeful unison to a static position near the left edge of the ice. They wait as sole female quintet member Pascale Jodoin nonchalantly strolls onto the rink and begins a smooth, controlled series of slides and dips. The elegant original score composed by Boivin kicks in, and by way of introduction, each skater gives us a taste of their particular gifts. Ba takes full advantage of his superior height with effortless single-leg raises, allowing his teammates to slip right under him as they pass. Dilley and Hamel gamble with low bends that allow them to skim their fingers across the ice, looking like ‘boarders riding the rim of a skate-park dip, or surfers taking a true digital plunge into an accommodating wave. Jodoin’s joy in performance echoes throughout the program as her crisp non-verbal voice cues guide her companions through their turns and reversals.
“Carte Blanche” makes ample room for a few showy, undoubtedly crowd-pleasing flourishes. The ensemble engages in a few rounds of “tap-skating,” the edges of their blades making sharp cracking sounds as they work their feet in rhythm to the Hamel-encouraged claps of the audience. There is also a short, lovely interlude where the quintet locks into a swaying tandem glide, with hands on shoulders as the rhythm of the music and the freedom of their bodies bring them together in icebound harmony. Hamel likewise leads the group in a stomping, percussive rondelet, literally amplified and energetically ignited by a special microphone clipped to his skate, enhancing every slice and slap of the blade on the skating surface.
The lion’s share of Le Patin Libre’s program is given over to a long excerpt from “Threshold,” a 2018 piece that spins a brief, impressionistic narrative of trial, defeat, and resuscitative redemption. Boivin’s music for this work takes on a less celebratory, more brooding and ruminative cast, poignant punctuation for the accompanying movement narrative.
“Threshold” proceeds in several interwoven sections, with a number of distinct choreographic high points. Hamel and Jodoin engage in a tussling pas de deux, with Hamel’s attempted escapes thwarted by the snagging skates of Jodoin whipping him back into the fray. Dilley and Boivin have their own paired feature, and it’s far less confrontational, a languid affair, the skaters bending and swaying in hypnotic concert. Dilley’s flowing mane of dark hair acts as almost an element of the performance itself as he works the ice with a bustling, muscular grace, Gene Kelly to the more practiced, Astaire-like mien of Hamel and Ba.
The piece builds to a frenzy as the five skaters pursue one another around the rink’s centerpiece obelisk before three of the men spin out, tumbling to the ice in a choreographed cataclysm. Only Boivin and Jodoin remain aloft, the latter’s command and care eventually guiding her fellow skaters back to their feet. But it takes the combined efforts of all four revived skaters to conjure Dilley to his upright state. Even so, he temporarily assumes a somnambulant character, lightly drifting in a back-projected blue spotlight beam, as the other four skate themselves once again into smooth, breezy, exultant form. Soon, Dilley has himself been rejuvenated by their energy and skill, and the full quintet comes together, sparked by Ba joining Jodoin with non-verbal urging exclamations, to a thrilling, fast-paced, and visceral finale.
Le Patin Libre are blessed to be among the only artists in their field attempting work of this nature, taking ice dancing away from its hidebound formal conventions and injecting it with the intensity, flair, and experimental textures of other areas of contemporary dance. The fact that these dancers are able to achieve effects akin to those of their fellow avant-garde Canadian dancers in Rubberband, and to do so amidst the potentially perilous act of ice skating, is mind-boggling to contemplate, and wondrous to behold. As someone who has never even been on ice skates in my life, to see Ba’s dazzling one-legged turns and Hamel’s dervish-like combination spins is a window into a whole new universe of the possibilities of the physical.
As Le Patin Libre took their bows from the bundled-up but buoyant outdoor late-winter crowd, Ba shouted out an enthusiastic “Merci beaucoup!” He seemed to be giving thanks not just for the ovation, but to the universe that has seen fit to grace him with such impressive abilities, and for bringing him together with four other singular talents with whom he can carry much-needed beauty and power into the wider world. The result was a performance for which skaters and spectators alike could all give ample thanks.
Le Patin Libre’s next appearance is a presentation of the piece “Murmuration” at the Thompson Arena at the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover, NH, on April 13-15. For more on what’s coming up for the troupe, visit www.lepatinlibre.com; French- and English-language versions of the site are available for viewing.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
MARCH 18, 1982
In an entry in the posthumously published The Andy Warhol Diaries, Andy Warhol mentions the news that the Book-of-the-Month Club has made a six-figure offer to author Jean Stein, a former editor of the Paris Review and of a well-received oral history of the life of Robert Kennedy, for the right to feature as an offering her forthcoming follow-up oral history, Edie: An American Biography, aka Edie: American Girl. The book, co-edited by Stein’s Paris Review colleague George Plimpton, provides a look at the incandescent but tragically brief life and career of Factory superstar Edie Sedgwick, and is composed of dozens of interviews with numerous intimates of Sedgwick’s, including her would-be professional Svengali Chuck Wein; Warhol screenwriter (and frequent on-set Sedgwick nemesis) Ronald Tavel; Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s pre-eminent 1960s assistant, who has his would-be star-vehicle film Vinyl stolen out from under him by the magnetic presence of Sedgwick; and Andy Warhol himself.
Even before Edie’s release, the word on the street is that the book presents a scathing portrait of Warhol as an user and exploiter of people, and tacitly holds him responsible for leading Sedgwick down the path of drug addiction that ultimately leads to her death in 1971, at 28 years of age. Warhol, of course, has not helped his case with previous statements regarding Sedgwick’s precarious plight. Prior to her death, he is famously quoted as hoping that, if she finally opts to take her own life, she lets him know “so I can film it.” He also has been publicly dismissive of their closeness in the years following her death, informing reporters on more than one occasion that, despite the extensive press coverage of their professional and social partnership, he “didn’t really know her well at all.”
Art critic Rene Ricard, who stars as Warhol alongside Sedgwick in her final film appearance for the artist, the never-released The Andy Warhol Story, has threatened to sue Stein over comments allegedly made about him in the manuscript. Undaunted, Stein approaches Factory caretaker Billy Name, another Edie interview subject, hoping to acquire photographs he has taken of the Factory scene for inclusion in the finished book. Warhol instead encourages Name to release his own book of images. “I really don’t mind spending all the time it would take to find the pictures,” says Warhol, “but I hear that Jean has some rotten things about me in her book and so I just don’t want to.”
Edie: An American Biography is published later that year, and becomes a best-seller. The book is also critically acclaimed, and is today still generally regarded as one of the definitive texts on the Factory years. Norman Mailer hails Stein’s volume as “the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for,” and in the New York Times, writer and essayist Sloane Crosley calls the book “the ultimate oral history and still the most objectively cool book I’ve ever read.” Edie is still in print, and stands as one of the cornerstones of the maintenance of the cultural narrative of Andy Warhol as cold-blooded spiritual parasite, Sedgwick surviving in the public imagination as the guileless victim of the machinations of a psychologically abusive opportunist. This take on the Warhol-Sedgwick relationship has been furthered by such works as George Hickenlooper’s 2006 film Factory Girl, starring Sienna Miller as Sedgwick and Guy Pearce as Warhol, and the somewhat less baldly condemnatory As It Turns Out (2022), a memoir-recollection by Sedgwick’s sister, Alice Sedgwick Wohl.
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