With every tiny movement, Anne Plamondon brings you inside her father's schizophrenia
A life in dance led her to build a performance about her father and his mental illness
A lifetime of dance — in different cities and different styles — has made Anne Plamondon a celebrated performer and choreographer. She joined Montreal's lauded RUBBERBANDance Group in 2002 as a dancer and was co-artistic director there from 2006 until 2016. And it's her vast physical vocabulary and ability to express innumerable emotions, details and moments that is the centre of her piece called Les mêmes yeux que toi, or The Same Eyes as Yours. It's a performance that tells the story of her father's schizophrenia — "his mimics, his physicality, his tics, the words that he would say, his behaviours."
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First staged in 2012, Plamondon has returned to rehearse The Same Eyes as Yours anew, translated into English. As you'll see in this video made by filmmaker Alejandro Álvarez Cadilla (also the star of CBC Arts series Off Kilter), Plamondon has compelling reasons to keep coming back to this work.
She says: "When it got in front of an audience, people would come up to me after and say, 'This is my brother.' 'This is my sister.' 'This is my uncle.' 'This is my grandfather.' 'This is me.'"
Keep up with Anne Plamondon here.
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