Fortier Danse-Création

Bras de plomb (“Arms of Lead”) stems from an actual encounter: between the man, dancer-choreographer, and a woman, an artist of motionless objects. Betty Goodwin has long been obsessed by the human body, which she has drawn, manipulated and treated in all manners--eroded, dissected, flayed--and which she has depicted its suffering, its wounds, and sometimes its exultation. She is confronted with one who seems to have sprung from her own imagination, as if she has erased the last traces of the drawing of a man in order to leave the living dancer space to dance. Her work seems to unfold on the fringe of a decor that she would like spare and clearly defined, heavy with its weight of metal, a solitary refuge. She said to Paul-André Fortier: “the arms.” She said “of flesh, of lead, absent--infused with their own special life.” And this is how the arms have come to be, as if the human destiny were imprisoned therein.

The works of Betty Goodwin, and in particular her depiction of the human body, seem to call out to the art of dance: the wounded and broken bodies floating on immense, translucid backdrops of washed colours, the worn or mutilated bodies, sketched out, erased and redrawn, always in a state of tension; bodies cloven together or painfully alone; bodies in a state of mouvement, the mouvement of life. Paul-André Fortier knew this, felt this, and so dared to ask for La Tentation de la transparence. She left him a few shawdowy, half-tone photographs and an isle-of-tombs style, and the desire to again work from within. Bras de plomb is the logical continuation of Goodwin’s Black Arms. Arms that dance, as light and graceful as wings, and then tense and stiff, heavier and heavier. The works of Betty Goodwin have graced numerous exhibitions, including a major retrospective organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1988. She was awarded the Prix Borduas en 1986, and since then has received several honorary doctorates from such institutions as the Université de Montréal and the University of Guelph.

Text of Aline Gélinas

“Fortier’s own strenght lies not in what he does but in how he does it. With the help of talents like Goodwin and lighting designer Jean Philippe Trépanier, he creates a soft, introspective magic with a beauty that transcends urban life.” – Linde Howe-Beck, Dance Magazine, New York, January 1994

Bras de plomb

Choreographer Paul-André Fortier. Dancer Paul-André Fortier. Original Music Gaétan Leboeuf. Lighting Jean Philippe Trépanier. Set Design Betty Goodwin assisted by Réal Benoit. Costumes Carmen Alie and Denis Lavoie from an original concept by Betty Goodwin.

This work is dedicated to Michèle Febvre. Premiered on September 1993, at the Salle Pierre-Mercure, at the Festival international de nouvelle danse, Montreal, QC, Canada.