Benoît Lachambre

With this choreographic work, Benoît Lachambre draws six performers from Montréal Danse—and the audience—into games of perception, studying the dancers’ physical presence and working with light, with the subtle ways bodies interact with one another. In this piece, the choreographer highlights and awakens the presence of his performers by playing with vivid, shifting, outrageously contrasting colors, creating imbalance and dissonance, amplifying illusion, or altering symmetry.

Active in the dance milieu since the 1970s, Benoît Lachambre was introduced in 1985 to improvisation and releasing techniques, whose kinesthetic research and exploration deeply permeate his teaching and choreographic composition. Among his strongest influences, Lachambre cites Meg Stuart, with whom he collaborates regularly, as well as Amélia Itcush for her work on weight and force distribution in the body.

Beyond his work as a choreographer and performer, Benoît Lachambre has earned wide recognition as a teacher through classes and workshops he has led around the world for over 20 years.

In 1996, he founded his own company, Par B.L.eux, in Montréal. This allowed him to multiply encounters and dynamic exchanges, collaborating with numerous internationally renowned choreographers and artists from different disciplines: Boris Charmatz, Sasha Waltz, Marie Chouinard, Louise Lecavalier, and Meg Stuart, as well as musician Hahn Rowe, with whom he created Forgeries, Love and Other Matters (2003), which won the prestigious Bessie Award in 2006. Since founding Par B.L.eux, Benoît Lachambre has created 15 works, participated in more than 20 external productions, and received 25 commissions, including I is memory (2006, solo for Louise Lecavalier) and JJ’s Voices (2010) for Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm.

In 2013, Benoît Lachambre received the GRAND PRIX DE LA DANSE DE MONTRÉAL, recognizing his entire career and, more specifically, his most recent creation Snakeskins.