BIOGRAPHY
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Sarah Bronsard is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based choreographer. She finds her most fertile terrain in flamenco and in the contemporary dance scene after a multidisciplinary artistic background in music, glass blowing, digital arts and a painting career. Her projects, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec (CALQ), have been presented in Quebec (Tangente, Société des Arts Technologiques), in Europe (France, Wales, Italy, Holland), in Africa (Morocco) and in Asia (Japan). Her work has been awarded "Best Original Creation" from the Cirque du Soleil (Fringe, 2012), the Pierre Lapointe award (UQAM, 2016 and 2017) as well as the David-Kilburn award (UQAM, 2020). In 2020, she worked at TOKAS (Tokyo Arts and Space in Japan), with support from CALQ, to begin work on Bruissement de mousses, a project that looks more closely at the perception of moss (bryophytes) in both Japanese esthetics and spirituality. In 2021, she toured Quebec with her piece Èbe and this piece has been chosen to represent Québec by the CALQ at the opening of the Festival International d'Art Vidéo in Casablanca. She is currently working on the piece L'écho des racines, a choreographic work founded in the meeting of Flamenco and Quebecois step dancing with a dozen of musicians and dancers, as well as Les Rigoles, a co-creation with singer Alexandra Templier on the phenomenon of laughter.
In addition to her choreographic practice, she has danced for Aurélie Pedron, Audrey Gaussiran and [ZØGMA]. In 2020 she completed a master’s thesis in research-creation at the UQAM dance department on the intercorporeality between dance and music.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As an interdisciplinary artist, I explore the fertile tension of the « between ». This reveals itself between physical states, between traditions, between beings, between artistic disciplines, and between different relationships to time. I prioritize co-creations with artists of diverse practices, each project being an opportunity to elaborate upon common interdisciplinary references with which we dialogue. Settling into this « between » space requires mutual listening and a surrender to instability which then allows a new balance to be found, together.
My relationship with movement is rooted in flamenco, an ardent and rigorously codified art form where dance and music are intimately connected. With its constant play between building tension and explosive release, flamenco incites a state of desire in me, an attraction, an intervallic tension that continually renews itself in an erotic rapport with life. Unlike a hardness that would hinder movement, flamenco teaches me to perceive tension as a constant adaptation moving between contraction and expansion. My choreographic works develop from this very tension, at times uncomfortable, between my respect towards the flamenco tradition and the desire to create outside of the references imposed by this tradition.
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The macroscopic and microscopic phenomena that unconsciously influence our lives above and beyond our daily observations, and the need to explore other relationships to time, are at the heart of the subjects that intrigue me. Such as the movement of the tides in Èbe, the activity of bryophytes in Bruissement de mousses, time and the inherent loss of all gestation in Ce qui émerge après (4kg). The thrill of discovering the poignant fragility of things strongly resonates in my creative process revealing, often in spite of me, a sense of melancholy.