Ontario audiences will get a taste of Montreal choreographer and dancer David Albert-Toth’s acclaimed work, la chute, one of five short pieces to be presented in a lottery-drawn series at an all-Canadian contemporary dance festival in Toronto.
Albert-Toth will perform an excerpt from la chute for the series What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) during the festival, dance: made in Canada/fait au Canada. Along with la chute, WYSIWYG includes four other 10-minute works by choreographers from Montreal, Toronto and St. John’s.
Albert-Toth began work on la chute in 2010, the year his 89-year-old grandfather, Imre Toth, died. A philosopher, Toth survived the Holocaust and was a founding member of the Romanian Communist party. That year, Albert-Toth’s father, Pierre Toth, also died unexpectedly at 56.
“All of a sudden there was a huge amount of family history lost and a big part of my identity was gone. I didn’t have a father or grandfather who could represent family history to me,” he said.
Albert-Toth created la chute while he was grieving and struggling with his identity. At the same time, he was studying Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, “about a man who was so adamant in his stance about things that gradually began to be chipped away,” he said.
La chute, Albert-Toth said, is about a “man who gradually begins to lose parts of himself and how he deals with that, so he’s standing somewhere between sanity and insanity.” It was selected by Dance Current magazine as one of 2013’s top 10 moments in dance. La chute was the first dance project the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal ever supported, Albert-Toth said.
During the application process, he said the subject of Jewish identity came up. A member of a Reconstructionist congregation in Montreal, he said that as Jew and a first-generation Quebecer, he’s lived his life “in between worlds, whether it’s Judaism and secularism or North America and Europe or English and French. There are always polarities pulling me apart.”
He added that “the idea of struggling to hold on to one’s identity is something that the Jewish People in the Diaspora can relate to on a very deep level because it’s at the forefront of a lot of our questions of how do we hold on to our identity in the societies we live.”
Albert-Toth sees a parallel between Jews and the Quebecois in their desire as minorities to preserve their identities. The touring version of la chute – which runs for 25 minutes – visited small Quebec towns, and Albert-Toth found it “really resonated” with the audiences. “I’ve always identified strongly to that notion that we’re people who live amongst other peoples in their land and we’re constantly adapting and negotiating ourselves,” he said.
The questions Jews ask themselves about maintaining their identity, he added, are similar to those “that Quebec people are asking themselves.”
Albert-Toth, 32, who has lived and studied in France, brought his background in urban dance to la chute, a dynamic piece that incorporates breakdancing. In his late teens, while attending CEGEP, he performed and taught urban dance. “I saw a lot of my peers becoming backup dancers for videos, which I didn’t want to do,” he said.
He “rebelled against hip hop,” he added, which led to his enrolling in Concordia University’s contemporary dance program. At Concordia, he met another rebel, Emily Gualtieri, who had fled the world of classical ballet, and in 2010, they formed their own company, Parts+Labour_Danse. Gualtieri is the co-choreographer of la chute.
Dance: made in Canada/fait au Canada presents WYSIWYG on Aug. 14 at 11 p.m. and Aug. 16 at 2 p.m. The festival runs at the Betty Oliphant Theatre from Aug. 13 to 16 and features works by emerging, mid-career and established dance artists, including several world premieres, along with artist chats, films about dance and a photography exhibit. For information and tickets, call 416-533-8577 or visit online at princessproductions.ca.
For more information about Albert-Toth, visit www.partsandlabourdanse.com.
