Louise Lecavalier, dancer and choreographer, was a member of dance companies Nouvelle Aire and Pointépiénu before joining La La La Human Steps and Édouard Lock in 1981.
An icon of the company for nearly two decades, she poured her heart and soul into her art, embodying extreme dance with passion and unbridled generosity, thrilling audiences everywhere she performed. She was described as “the most brilliant and tragic dancer of our time (…) Legs of fire” (Melody Maker, London) and as “The signature of La La La Human Steps. Often imitated, never equaled.” (Le Monde, Paris).
Until May 1999, Louise was an integral part of all the major creations and collaborations that impacted the course of La La La Human Steps – with the Bolshoi Ballet, David Bowie, and Frank Zappa, as well as in the role of Vita Minh in the Kathryn Bigelow film, Strange Days.
She worked on a number of independent projects before founding her company, Fou Glorieux, in 2006. Through choreography commissions and her own creations, she has since pursued a quest based on virtuosity, the surpassing of oneself, and risk-taking – a quest for the absolute in which she strives to bring out “the more than human in the human.”
In 2006, she founded her company, Fou Glorieux, working with Tedd Robinson Crystal Pite and Nigel Charnock before collaborating with Benoît Lachambre with whom she shares a sensitivity for performance and authentic movement. Together, they will create the magnificent Is You Me (FTA, 2008) and I IS MEMORY (2006).
Beginning in 2012, her creations were immediate successes, revealing Louise to herself and to the public as a singular, eminently contemporary choreographer. The works So Blue (2012-2022), Mille Batailles (2016-2020), and STATIONS (2020-2024) have had lengthy touring lives and have taken us into inimitable, highly personal choreographic worlds.
In a new creation in 2023, she collaborated with visual artist Lu Yang as part of the 6th International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN) presented by ELEKTRA at Arsenal Contemporary Art Montreal. This live motion-capture work, Delusional World, won over a younger, more diverse audience, laying the groundwork for Louise’s new creation, to premiere in Germany in December 2024 and north american premiere at the FTA 2025.
The solo from So Blue, re-created for two dancers of Gauthier Dance under a new title, Ether, had its world premiere in the ELEMENTS program in Stuttgart, Germany on February 29, 2024. More recently, on April 10, 2024, Louise created and danced a new solo entitled Minutes around late afternoon in an evening shared with artists Germaine Acogny & Malou Airaudo and Ben Duke at the Elixir Festival, Sadler’s Wells, London. On January 29, 2024, Louise was invited to speak at Concordia University’s Wild Talks Lecture Series with moderator MJ Thompson, professor and dance researcher, and author of a book on Louise Lecavalier to be published in 2024. The two-hour in-person event was attended by 320 people.
Louise Lecavalier is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and distinctions in the arts including the Denise-Pelletier prize awarded by the Government of Quebec and an honorary doctorate from UQAM in 2017. In June 2021, the title of Citizen of Honor, City of Montreal, was awarded to her by the mayor Valérie Plante at the Théâtre Maisonneuve, Place des Arts during the performance of Stations. Most recently; in 2023, she became an Officière of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
Credit : Louise Lecavalier @Massimo Chiaradia