*My gloss today could not be written without an article written on Dave St. Pierre by Alanna Thain and VK Preston. They provide the only scholarly appraisal of DSP’s work (I haven’t seen the piece live myself), but also for their provocative reading of Over My Dead Body as a work “dancing from within the transplant ecology itself.” (43)* For my short presentation, I will focus on a piece of contemporary dance called Over My Dead Body (2009), by Quebecois dancer-choreographer Dave St. Pierre. St. Pierre is best known for his trilogy of works Sociology and Other Contemporary Utopias, beginning in 2004 with La Pornographie des Ames (literally “Pornography of Souls” but badly transposed to the English title Bare Naked Souls). The next work in the set is the raucous 2007 piece, Un Peu de Tendresse, Bordel de Merde! (also softened in translation, to A Little Bit of Tenderness, for Crying Out Loud). St. Pierre rounds off his Sociology with Foudres in 2012. The trilogy explores “corporeal and emotional nakedness and stages love and desire alongside bruising social violence.” (28) Hailed at once as “Pina Bausch’s pornographic son” and “Michel Houllebecq’s choreographic nephew,”(in Julidans 2012), St Pierre is known for antidisciplinary dances which turn on “loss (of love, of life) with such intensity that their endings are continually postponed, delayed, and renewed, causing commotion—in the literal sense of outrage—through co-motion—moving together, or being moved together, as audience and performer.” (Thain and Preston 29)

During this decade of creation, St. Pierre’s very survival as a person with cystic fibrosis was at stake. While working on the trilogy and waiting for his transplant, St. Pierre had to be two hours away from the hospital at all times. He began performing more intimate works: solos and small group works that publicly grapple with the progressive genetic disease affecting his lungs. His personal story is widely known in Quebec, and these smaller works’ willingness to “show his changing body, his scars, and breathlessness onstage” reflects a dramaturgical prerogative to continually reconfigure boundaries between public, private, and imagined worlds/bodies—especially insofar as his dance dramaturgies consistently defer the sense of a ending, asking “what it means to make sense of a story as a script for an ending that suddenly offers new possibilities for life.” (29) He received, as described by Nathalie Petrowski, the “flaming new” (flambant neuf) lungs of a “healthy, active 17-year-old” in a twice-postponed surgery St-Pierre compares to “a train that runs over you, reverses to hit you harder and runs over you again” (in Petrowski 2011a).

Over My Dead Body (2009) as an intervention was explicitly a solo, performed with collaborators, in which St. Pierre is bound to an oxygen canister he wheels about with him on stage. Alone, he begins a monologue, asking: “How does one dance a solo while gasping for breath?” His response appears to be distributive, inviting three other dancers to share the stage with him to dance the solo. Over My Dead Body begins with a plastic-covered floor, a dark mass moving indistinctly beneath it. Suddenly, a gorilla rips through the plastic, moving territorially around the space. Abruptly standing upright, the gorilla removes his head, exclaiming “C’est moi!” delightedly. Julie Perron, another dancer, is tasked with impersonating Celine Dion, the celebrity “fairy-godmother of cystic fibrosis” well known for her song “Vole” (“Fly”) which enjoins her young niece Karine’s soul “to flee this earth, its pain, and her ‘deformed’ body” (38). Lipsynching aggressively, this Céline “appropriates the affective lure of St-Pierre’s tragedy, snatching up his oxygen canister with enthusiastic obliviousness and converting it into a microphone (literally stealing his breath)”(38)  St. Pierre represents her as the worst kind of phony, someone who appropriates tenderness to a predictable sentimentality. The final hybridised body in the piece is St Pierre himself, in a bunny costume, describing a dream he had “of shooting carrots like darts into his partner’s ass,” which Robidoux helps him to try, bending over while St Pierre launches carrots at him. The faithful reproduction of the dream fails, but only as much as it joyfully resolves into a staggering laughter. Only at the end of Over My Dead Body does St. Pierre ‘actually dance’–performing in the months before his transplants, he moves with shallow, cautious breaths “staking a claim to futurity in dancing slowness.” (45)

For Thain and Preston, “becoming-animal” is to experience the derangement of the body entering into new and unforeseen articulations of sensation and potential” (48). St-Pierre insistently foregrounds complicated questions of authorship, autonomy, and bodily integrity as he excavates relationships between love, impersonation, and illness in the work. He continually offers tender interrogations of “dying as a future shared by all,” rejecting mere sentiment for “the violent physicality of that which is tender: when a wound or a bruise brings a fascinated pleasure with the pain of pressing on it.” (35)

Thain, Alanna and Preston, VK. “Tendering the Flesh: The ABCs of Dave St Pierre’s Contemporary Utopias” in TDR: The Drama Review. Vol 57, no.4. Winter 2013. p. 28-51. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/526056.