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Frédérick Gravel is a choreographer, dancer, lighting designer, musician and researcher. As a choreographer, his latest creation is Gravel Works. Created at Tangente in October 2008, this piece has been presented at the TransAmériques Festival (FTA) in Spring 2009 and will soon tour around the world. Gravel is the co-founder of La 2e Porte à Gauche, a production company in contemporary dance. He is the director of Grouped’ArtGravelArtGroup (GAG), a grouping of performers in various art disciplines who participate in his creations.

Starting with his earliest pieces, notably Du pittoresque en Danse, et dans la mienne en particulier in 2004 (with a nod to Kandinsky!), Frédérick Gravel, although still a student at the time, made his mark with his tone, stage intelligence and direct complicity with the audience. This was (and is) a choreographer to keep an eye on. His mentor is Daniel Léveillé, and his brother-in-arms Dave St-Pierre, for whom he danced. He is also a great admirer of Édouard Lock, a distant source of inspiration.

But dance historians might find in his work an affinity with post-modern American dance of the ‘60s, given his bent for questioning or distancing himself from the affectations of dance. As he has noted, “I like to create a show with a non-show […] and demystify the spectacular,” a position that evokes Yvonne Rainer and her No Manifesto.

Gravel cultivates artistic ambiguity, cultural transversality, the mixing of disciplines and post-modern irony. After all, it is part of the current climate. He plays with the contemporary zeitgeist, flippant and skeptical. He is complicit with the audience, thumbing his nose at the avant-garde, at the exclusive preserves of the elite. In lucid, offhand fashion, he takes popular culture and establishment culture out of their assigned roles and brings them together.

His work is presented not only in underground performance spaces in Montreal and New York, but at scholarly symposia as well.

GRAVELWORKS: SEX (SOME), ROCK, BEER AND FRIES

In its current “temporarily final” (according to Gravel) guise, GravelWorks is a showcase of moods, humour, bodies, musical colours, short dances, pop songs, personalities and friendly impertinence. Presented in “best of ” concert form, the elastic temporality of this piece (begun in 2006), has undergone a number of variations depending on the number of artists involved and the arrangement of the stand-alone pieces as an ensemble. Whether the long or the short version, it has attracted audiences at Studio 303, Performance Mix in Soho, Tangente and The Art(prononcez dehors) during the first OFF.T.A event. Constructed like a

Moebius strip, it takes the spetator on a journey between the inside and the outside of the spectacle, or, as Gravel himself suggests, from the head to the heart to the genitals, in whichever order you wish!

GROUPED’ARTGRAVELARTGROUP (GAG)

Gravel and his accomplices are part of a multi-talented generation of artists who graduated with diplomas in dance, theatre or music. They have worked with the choreographers Dave St-Pierre (F.Gravel, Ducharme), Daniel Léveillé (Milicevic), Ginette Laurin (Wright) and Roger Sinha (Vigneault), and also with the musical
groups Basta (Boucher) and The Ease Down (H. Gravel).