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Struggle and strife DUET DANCE WORKS TACKLE DEEP, DARK QUESTIONS By: Holly Harris Posted: 09/8/2016 4:00 AM

Tracey Kolenchuk photo While some might prefer to live life in kinder, gentler comfort zones, local dance artists Hilary Crist and Janelle Hacault have been tackling deeper, grittier issues of existential angst this past year.

The dynamic duo will be unveiling the fruits of their labours as their newly minted contemporary dance troupe, .6 Ricochet, presents its inaugural production, Essentia, this weekend, promising to whisk viewers to "a precarious place between the known and the invisible."

The 50-minute show (including intermission) features two duets exploring the idea of struggle, choreographed/performed by the company’s co-founding artistic directors.

"We wanted to explore what we felt were essential elements in all our lives," Hacault, 28, says over coffee at a downtown café. "Who are we? And what is at the core of our essence? Both our pieces are not necessarily answering those questions, but is asking them to ourselves."

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The two dance artist met while performing together in

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Struggle and strife - Winnipeg Free Press

Rodney Braun Photo

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment…

… The two dance artist met while performing together in Winnipeg-based choreographer Alexandra Elliott’s When All is Said at the 2014 Toronto Fringe Festival. They quickly realized they shared a simpatico artistic sensibility and a thirst for exploring ideas through choreography, leading them to join forces to stage an earlier incarnation of Essentia at the 2015 Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival.

Since then, they have also toured the show to two indie arts festivals: SpringWorks in Stratford, Ont., and Edmonton’s NextFest this past spring, allowing them to further hone their ideas and flesh out more details for the work’s local première.

The first piece is Flin Flon-born Hacault’s Imprimatur, which had its genesis in her profound grief and subsequent obsession with the afterlife after losing her beloved, devotedly Catholic mother to breast cancer in 2012. The 20-minute autobiographical duet takes viewers into her own proverbial dark night of the soul, in which she questioned life itself.

"When my mom died I struggled a lot with: Where is she? Is she going anywhere? Where is this place?" Hacault confesses.

"I have a deep faith in Christianity, but when that happened to me, the rubber hit the road. I wrestled with what I believed was God. I couldn’t quite accept what God did to me."

Essentia .6 Ricochet ● Rachel Browne Theatre ● Sept. 9-11, 8 p.m. ● Tickets ($20) and further information at crist.hacault@gmail.com or visit

The alumna of the School of Contemporary Dancers’ Professional Program – who learned her mother’s disease was terminal on the eve of her 2012 graduation ceremony — drew inspiration from the biblical "Jacob and the Angel" story, in which the archetypal figure battles with God to find ultimate acceptance.

"A sense of resolution comes through the awareness that you won’t ever know," she says of her piece, which also includes her own soulful poetry. "It’s about coming to peace with those questions that are still unanswered."

The Toronto-born Crist, 32, who graduated with a fine arts degree from Ryerson University in 2011 and moved to Winnipeg in October 2012, first conceived her work, The Hopeless Dream of Being, after seeing Ingmar Bergman’s haunting classic film Persona.

"It’s about the dichotomy of personality and persona, and how that difference complicates relationships," Crist says of her 20-minute piece. "It’s the battle between the true and tortured self, and the struggle to hide."

Struggle and strife - Winnipeg Free Press

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Her theatrically charged work features particularly striking visual imagery. The piece opens with Hacault’s head swaddled in layers of pink tulle, garbed in a jacket festooned with bulging eyeballs, suggesting the watchful eyes of society. Crist appears in a graphic, insect-like bodysuit, with her original pastiche score including buzzing sounds of locusts that infuse the entire work with ominous, apocalyptic foreboding.

"Our characters are like two monsters, or incarnations of your most upsetting images or thoughts about yourself," Crist explains, adding the piece ends in a final elegiac solo that symbolizes hard-won peace and acceptance.

Living in today’s brave new world of Google and Snapchat is not always conducive to the process of deep introspection. The like-minded collaborators say the often highly imagistic and abstract art of dance is something not to be feared, but embraced.

"These days, there is so much concrete information and so many facts that are constantly thrown at you. It’s nice to let it all go and allow yourself to expand," Crist says.

"Dance can be like cloud-gazing, and you don’t have to analyze every little step," Hacault adds, her words tumbling on her partner’s. "It’s OK to not know what it all means, and just feel." holly.harris@shaw.ca