ACERCA DE ESTE EPISODIO
Catherine Gaudet is a Montreal choreographer. Her piece Les jolies choses won the Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal in 2022 and has toured Canada and Europe since. In this conversation with Asia Shcherbakova and Patrick Oancia, she explains how she builds a performance.
Her working tool is ambiguity: several possible meanings laid down at once, so the spectator keeps looking for one. She begins in the studio without a plan and guides her dancers through images and physical forces until they stop watching themselves, and she treats every piece as a ritual. She talks about fatigue and music as part of the state a piece produces, about what she wants to happen in the body of the person watching, and about the working conditions of dancers in Quebec and France.
Her new solo for James Phillips, Hors-d'œuvre, runs at Théâtre La Chapelle in Montreal from September 23 to 26, 2026.
The conversation is mostly in French, with Asia and Patrick speaking English. The video version has English and French subtitles. Full transcripts in English, French and Japanese are on the episode page:
https://baseworks.com/podcast/catherine-gaudet-ambiguity-ritual-audience
Chapters
(00:00:00) Introduction
(00:03:41) Three bodies in a performance
(00:05:14) From dancer to choreographer
(00:09:18) Ambiguity as a vector of sensation
(00:10:37) The aesthetic shock
(00:14:31) State over message
(00:17:19) No plan in the studio
(00:19:34) The rabbit ears
(00:22:32) Directing with forces and images
(00:26:59) The thousand faces
(00:30:19) "The audience is me"
(00:33:51) Reducing a piece to one figure
(00:36:57) Hypnosis and meditative ritual
(00:40:01) Trust without understanding
(00:43:38) The pink ball
(00:45:26) Ritual as a state machine
(00:47:43) The head as antenna
(00:48:52) Exhaustion and the second wind
(00:52:07) The music: a four-minute loop
(00:56:05) Jung and the truths of the blood
(01:01:10) The spectator, through herself
(01:02:03) The movement in the spectator
(01:08:03) Why the videos don't do it
(01:09:54) Twenty years of creation
(01:13:09) Creation as religion
(01:14:54) The poster downstairs
(01:16:02) Working conditions for dancers
(01:20:27) Adversity and comfort
(01:22:23) Idealism and compromise
(01:25:43) Hors-d'œuvre at La Chapelle
(01:26:56) A shared language
(01:28:17) Closing message
Links
Compagnie Catherine Gaudet: https://catherinegaudet.com/en/
Hors-d'œuvre at Théâtre La Chapelle: https://www.lachapelle.org/fr/spectacles/hors-doeuvre
Disembodied by Dance, Asia's article: https://baseworks.com/communications/disembodied-by-dance-embodied-mind/
Baseworks events in Montreal: https://baseworks.com/events/
Recorded at Espace Libre (Studio NTE), Montreal, on September 3, 2026. Podcast artwork photo by Julie Artacho.
