Contemporary dance, however, has an opacity I never quite felt at ease with. I am not talking about the macho “you’ll never catch me looking at people in tutus hopping on a stage” fright, but more of an intellectual lack of confidence: what if I don’t get it?

And yet when I stumbled upon the presentation of O Vertigo’s La Chambre Blanche, its themes of madness and alienation and its incredible aesthetics made me buy a couple of tickets without much thought.

La Chambre Blanche is a choreographical work in which a confining site brings on states of dismay and frenzy in its captives. In the White Room, the characters are probed in their deepest intimacy and placed in a situation of extreme vulnerability where the body has no choice but to abandon itself to disequilibrium and dizziness.
(– Ginette Laurin, Choreographer)

My fears were apparently unjustified. Obviously I still have no idea what the choreographer and dancers meant with their creation, but they provided me with a canvas on which to apply my own interpretation, my own story. Within the first 10 minutes I was following a story of violence, domestic abuse, miscommunication, and how the characters on stage had no other escape than madness.

“You told me to wait here, and I waited here all that time and you never came back”, one of the character whispers to the outside world. They don’t know they can leave, when their only horizon is to bounce on the walls of the cramped white room, and interact – through love or death – whith whoever happens to be there, too.

I left the theater battered, exhausted, sore in my every muscle as if I’d been the one prancing around for that hour. I left with a head abuzz with thoughts and full of stories. I am not afraid of contemporary dance any more.

Short video of La Chambre Blanche (2008)