Collaborations

Bent Hollow

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After completing musical training at the Conservatoire de Paris, Clara Furey launched her career as a singer-songwriter.

She later trained as a dancer at the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal and worked with choreographers such as George Stamos, Damien Jalet, and Benoît Lachambre. An artist accustomed to collaborative work (Untied Tales with Peter Jasko, showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2016, Ciguë with Éric Arnal Burtschy), Furey created her first solo work as artistic director in 2017 with Cosmic Love, a collective piece with minimal gestures, exploring the voids and invisibilities in the interactions between body, song, and space.

As both a choreographer and a performer, Furey is interested in shifting codes within various forms of art by way of an interdisciplinary dialogue. In 2017, she performed When Even The 90 times alongside a sculpture by Marc Quinn as part of the Leonard Cohen exhibit at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. She is the choreographer of Rather a Ditch (2019), a solo piece written for Céline Bonnier centring on the permeability of bodies, as a response to Steve Reich’s album Different Trains.

Her works toured in numerous festivals including the Biennale of Venice, Les Rencontres Chorégraphiques in Paris, the Festival TransAmériques in Montreal, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Performance Mix in New-York City and in different countries such as Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Azerbaïdjan and Bulgaria.

With Dog Rising, Furey concludes her exploration of tension and immobility, freeing previously contained energies in a performance focusing on persistence, groove and pleasure. She insists on the repetition of infinite loops through an extreme physical journey, a mesmerizing, haunting and penetrating spiral.

Artistic intent

I’m interested in exploring the codes that travel in and across various art forms.

My practice in movement gives equal consideration to both space and sound, with the goal of encouraging the awakening of the sensorial perceptions of the audience and the performers, giving them emotive immediacy, direct access.

I’m guided by the belief that beauty might appear after a long arduous process. Not beauty that appears out of nowhere, but beauty that is already there, under the layers.

I often work in minimalist set-ups that can foster intimate atmospheres and invite us to take a contemplative posture. I want to leave room for the creative mind of the spectator. Sometimes a deep feeling of emptiness arises in my work or rather an investigation around the concept of emptiness and all the links and dynamics that it is filled with. The void becomes a conveyor of possibilities and allows all form of communication to coexist.

I am in a constant dialogue with the other mediums and collaborators taking part in the work and this is what excites me. This was the case, for example, with my dance When Even The beside one of Marc Quinn’s imposing lead sculptures, the aptly named Coaxial Plank Density where I sought to question the existential void in a ritual dance which examined the porosity between life and death.

Ultimately – in between the lines of space and sound, I create pieces that are at once literal and abstract in which audiences can assemble their own elements, understand what they need to understand as they see fit. It is in abstract dense poetic fragments and their ability to compress the story that I often find inspiration to begin a new work. Moving through improvisations and a constant reconsideration of the most basic gestures, my performances often employ duration and repetition of ritualized movements. I take great care not to take this for granted. Because these movements always come loaded with a constantly changing mix of both meaning and non-meaning.

I’m interested in what you could call “existential dance experiments” where I can explore states of being, where we can explore mystical interior landscapes and attempt to locate radiance within the enveloping darkness.

I’m interested in the different constellations of listening we can develop through physical practices and the practice of empathy.

My work is porous – porous in the choreographic offerings I propose, porous in what the performers exude, a porosity I hope can be seen and felt in the energetic exchange between us all.