Manuel Roque bang bang

Recipient of Les Prix de la Danse de Montréal 2017 for performance as a solo with bang bang, Manuel Roque returns to the piece with a new energy, performed as a duet. This is a work that pushes artist and audience to the limit. Involving a repetition of jumps and athletic patterns counted in 11, bang bang demands exceptional concentration and physical commitment from the performers. This work gradually drips with combativeness and resistance, revealing the human-performers’ flaws. As a pair, the ordeal becomes a sharing of strengths and weaknesses, where continuing becomes at once absurd, poetic, and political.

“Manuel Roque does more than dance for us; he dances us, embodies our inability to dance, and generously restores dance to us, illuminating that precise place where the body becomes spirit and finds its illuminated unity.” – Jean Louis Perrier, Revue Movement, Montréal (translated from French)