An instinct for beauty? An instinct for pain? In this piece, choreographer Virginie Brunelle raises a toast to raw emotion with bitter poetry that questions the unfinished, the incomplete – what might remain between two people – offering this sustained action frozen in time like a memory, an aching pain. A mark, a link, a point of reference that is both timeless and of a specific time, the piece casts a gaze at the group, the family and the self. In a contemporary society nourished by this dangerous substance, Virginie Brunelle proves that pain can also be an emotional bridge, a source for encounters between the six performers and the audience, an experience that leaves no one unscathed.

Virginie Brunelle is an exciting young choreographer at the forefront of the Montreal dance scene. With this new creation, she offers a poetic work that is sometimes romantic, sometimes crude, but always informed by her ongoing investigation of human relations. Here, she explores our connection to each other, a link that can never be truly broken, one that leaves behind traces, residue, a memory.

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To the pain that lingers is a co-production of the National Arts Centre and The CanDance Network Creation Fund (Agora de la danse, The Banff Centre, Theatre Junction GRAND, Vancouver International Dance Festival), and is supported by the Dance Section of the Canada Council for the Arts.