Édouard Lock
Directing
Biography
Édouard Lock is a Canadian dance choreographer and founder of the Canadian dance group, La La La Human Steps. He formed La La La Human Steps in 1980, and began choreographing full-length works, which soon attracted international attention. Since 1985, each work for La La La has toured internationally for up to two years. The company was disbanded in September 2015 owing to financial difficulties. Édouard Lock has also worked with several figures in the world of music. He created a choreographed event with David Bowie and Louise Lecavalier as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, filmed by video artist Nam June Paik, then continued his collaboration with Bowie in 1990 as creator and art director of his Sound + Vision world tour. In 1992. he worked with Frank Zappa on the performance of Yellow Shark, alongside the Ensemble Modern, the Frankfurt Alte Oper, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Konzerthaus. He also commishioned works from and colllborated with Iggy Pop, and Einstürzende Neubauten.
Known For
Director Robert Carsen and his creative team flood the stage with summer blossoms, drifts of autumn leaves, winter snows and thunderous spring storms. The cast of 140 are attired in elegant costumes inspired by late 1940s Dior. This mythical tale of a young queen, Alphise, determined to abdicate rather than contemplate an enforced marriage to a descendant of Boreas, is nothing less than highly-charged.
Les Boréades
The multi-award-winning dance film Amelia (2002), directed and choreographed by Edouard Lock and performed by the acclaimed dance company La La La Human Steps, explores the use of point technique using extended intertwining solos, complex partnering sequences and extreme speed to generate powerful performances with unexpected moments of tender emotion and serenity.
Amelia
To bring together again, for the first time since their premiere on a December evening in Moscow, Tchaikovsky’s opera Iolanta and ballet The Nutcracker, was the audacious challenge that Russian stage director Dmitri Tcherniakov accepted for the Palais Garnier in Paris in March 2016 : a revolutionary production, which was to become one of the key events of the Paris Opera season.
Tchaikovsky: Iolanta / The Nutcracker
Canadas contemporary dance group La La La Human Steps performs Édouard Lock's "Human Sex" .
Human Sex
A lone ballerina dances with her reflection in Écho, a film directed by world-renowned choreographer Édouard Lock. Interpreted by the principal dancer of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Rachele Buriassi, this intimate solo piece was inspired by feelings of solitude experienced in lockdown. It begins with a ballerina in the familiar surroundings of a theatre, but the camera soon closes in on the figure and renders it almost abstract, disrupting one’s sense of time and space. An evocative score by James O’Callaghan enters into dialogue with Buriassi’s movements as she slips in and out of shadow and light, illusion and reality.