- Artistic Director Elle Barbara
AUTOGYNEGAMY is an intimate and political multidisciplinary ceremonial performance that takes place in a deconsecrated church. In this performance, Elle, eight dancers and two actors explore themes such as death, trauma, sacrifice and rebirth. Drawing on zir career as a self-taught artist, Elle Barbara combines disciplines (song, dance, music, theatre and digital media), symbols and artistic movements to create friction between the past and the future, the traditional and the technological, the magical and the divine, the living and the inanimate, making AUTOGYNEGAMY something that is unsettling and enchanting all at once.
Elle Barbara is impelled to root zir artistic practice in both socio-political realities and zir aesthetic aspirations and vision.
Company
Elle Barbara is a Montréal-based avant-garde singer-songwriter, pin-up artist, performer and community facilitator, whose musical output alternately combines elements of sophisti-pop, jazz, soul, glam, and underground. A lover of the odd, obscure, and overlooked elements in pop music, Elle Barbara made zir name in artist-run spaces at the turn of the 2010s and has had a cult following ever since.
In recent years, Elle Barbara has centred zir efforts around trans and queer community organizing, including contributions to Montréal’s re-emerging ballroom scene as Mother of the iconic, idiosyncratic House of Barbara. The House of Barbara is a collective whose transdisciplinary practice encompasses art, activism and music. And with zir concept group Elle Barbara’s Black Space, Elle Barbara aims to centre zir Black femininity with a lineup solely made up of musicians of African descent.
Danse-Cité accompanies artists as they develop and unfold their artistic process, from the inception of an idea to its presentation before an audience. Danse-Cité is invested in self-critical and sustainable structural work to become an organization that understands power and respects the dignity and self-determination of the humans, artists, and cultural workers with whom it comes into contact, no matter their origin, ethnicity, gender, ability, size, religion, or age.
Danse-Cité supports the emergence of new authorship, a diversity of practices and backgrounds, the maturing of artistic processes as well as the meeting and integration of other disciplinary practices. Danse-Cité is developing activities that facilitate universal access to the arts.
Creative team
- Artistic Director Elle Barbara
- Co-choreographer Sasha Kleinplatz
- Dramaturg Raja Feather Kelly
- Co-author Enora Rivière
- Sound Designer Markus Lake
- Set Designer Marilène Bastien
- Lighting Designer Jon Cleveland
- Costume Designer Elen Ewing
National Creation Fund investment
Our $170,000 investment will give the company an opportunity to increase rehearsal time, invest in exceptional designs and create site-specific work in meaningful and atypical locations, offering a memorable artistic experience.
“The NAC’s National Creation Fund will be instrumental in enabling our team to fully realize our ambitious artistic vision. With support from the Fund, we will be able to put on a large-scale production in a monumental venue with a substantial number of performers to create an extraordinary artistic experience.” – Elle Barbara
Credits
AUTOGYNEGAMY is a co-production of the House of Barbara and Danse-Cité. AUTOGYNEGAMY is developed with support from the National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund.
Performance dates
Past performances
Performance dates
World premiere in 2025.
