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| Laurence Lemieux in Anne: "...lives linger and ripple forward." (Photo: Jeremy Mimnagh.) |
Laurence Lemieux’s Anne is a work of elemental courage and restraint, a memory piece where ancestry comes alive in the present and takes shape in the body. The world premiere, which opened at Toronto’s The Citadel on Oct. 1, begins in near-silence. Lemieux stands motionless on a reflective Marley floor, upright in wide trousers and a pleated peplum shirt, a costume that bridges eras. Then, almost imperceptibly, her spine creases and her form dips. The veteran dancer-choreographer seems to age before our eyes, centuries carried in a body overtaken by the past.
As the solo performance unfolds, Lemieux circles Anne Martin—born in 1614 and buried in 1684 on Quebec’s Île d’Orléans—a distant ancestor whose story she searches for, as if probing the boundaries of her own identity.
Here, lineage is not narrated, but distilled: a gathering of physical states and sensations that invite the audience into an elemental process of recognition and imagining.
Movement is pared back to its essence. Folds of the spine, gathering of limbs and inward turns serve as markers of time’s accumulation, not diversions of technical display. Lemieux’s authority is revealed in her restraint. Gestures distil inheritance, probing its fragility.
At one charged moment, she steps into a voluminous costume of layered tulle; as she moves, the restless rustle conjures grass, water and the muffled steps of an animal—a sensual, trembling sound that blurs boundaries between body and landscape, exposing a delicate tension that reverberates throughout the approximately 45-minute piece.
Realized through close artistic partnerships, including rehearsal director Danielle Baskerville, the dance draws on the contribution of artists whose roles were essential to its final form.
Aidan McConnell’s score moves like shifting weather, its low frequencies threaded with breathy winds and the hush of imagined snow; vast soundscapes recall the Canadian landscape. The textures are spare yet enveloping. When a solitary piano line appears, it frees Lemieux’s arms in a rare spiral, as if swimming or searching through drift and memory.
At that moment, light and sound converge into something cosmic: the stage seems to open into a night sky, her body moving among scattered points of illumination, tracing connections across time. For much of the piece, score and movement become a dialogue in restraint, exploring what emotion remains when everything extraneous is taken away.
Nic Vincent’s lighting transforms the space. Panels of light line the back wall, faint at first, like distant beacons, then gleam into radiance that suggests horizons and voids. Shadow and brightness are handled with a sculptor’s care, extending the palette without overwhelming the performance.
Edward Poitras’s set stands as the work’s axis: a single vertical post crowned with a floating slab, invoking island, tree, roots and reach. It is inscribed “Isle de Bascuz,” the name French explorer Jacques Cartier gave Île d’Orléans in 1534, grounding the dance in the idea of encounter and historical beginnings. Poitras, the Métis/Saulteaux artist who first represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, provides a symbolic centre to which Lemieux returns, echoing the passage of generations and the persistence of bloodline.
But Anne is never simply autobiography. It enacts how lives linger and ripple forward, how memory and flesh remain intertwined across centuries to shape what we inherit. There’s a sense, watching, that no one moves alone, each body partnered by those who came before.
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– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World.
At that moment, light and sound converge into something cosmic: the stage seems to open into a night sky, her body moving among scattered points of illumination, tracing connections across time. For much of the piece, score and movement become a dialogue in restraint, exploring what emotion remains when everything extraneous is taken away.
Nic Vincent’s lighting transforms the space. Panels of light line the back wall, faint at first, like distant beacons, then gleam into radiance that suggests horizons and voids. Shadow and brightness are handled with a sculptor’s care, extending the palette without overwhelming the performance.
Edward Poitras’s set stands as the work’s axis: a single vertical post crowned with a floating slab, invoking island, tree, roots and reach. It is inscribed “Isle de Bascuz,” the name French explorer Jacques Cartier gave Île d’Orléans in 1534, grounding the dance in the idea of encounter and historical beginnings. Poitras, the Métis/Saulteaux artist who first represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, provides a symbolic centre to which Lemieux returns, echoing the passage of generations and the persistence of bloodline.
But Anne is never simply autobiography. It enacts how lives linger and ripple forward, how memory and flesh remain intertwined across centuries to shape what we inherit. There’s a sense, watching, that no one moves alone, each body partnered by those who came before.
.jpeg)
– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World. 
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