His last piece,
Gravel Works, was rock; this one will be folk. Frédérick Gravel takes on the confusion of the contemporary American male, whether he hails from a bland suburb, a country road or a cowboy movie. He is accompanied by the musician Stéphane Boucher, a multi-instrumentalist who creates sound and music turmoil, Dave St-Pierre, the enfant terrible of trash choreography and Nicolas Cantin, an offbeat artist. Gravel himself will also be onstage for the festivities for he is a musician, set designer and, as he likes to say, a “bad dancer who hopes to become an interesting bad dancer”. His choreographies are patchworks of component scenes, showcases presented in “best of” concert fashion, deconstructed and constantly evolving. He delights in exposing the inner workings of both the theatrical machine and the machinery of the emotions. With his chronic irreverence, Gravel aims for dance that is not snobbish, dance that casually contains several levels of intelligence without being complicated. The music is performed live, the scratching of dirty chords. The lighting is vibrant, and the piece plays with irony and distancing. It is a tale of distraught men, the ordinary run-of-the-mill North American male – beer, T-shirts, baseball caps, cowboy boots, bare bellies and their hesitations, outbursts of violence, confusion, brusque changes of mood, right left, front and back, lurching in a drunken haze of beer and powerlessness.
“In many ways, Gravel is everything Montreal’s contemporary dance scene needs right now, and he’s got a clear vision of what he wants.”
Philip Szporer, Hour, may 2009
“Whether it holds up as choreography for the ages is another story, but his fans don't care.”
Philip Szporer, Hour, December 2004
