At the Maison Tanguay

In the fall of 2004, Claire Jenny, artistic director of the dance company Point Virgule, and her dancers finally landed on Quebec soil to bring to life an out of the ordinary dream.  In 50 hours spread out over three weeks, the french dance group  created a 45 minute choreography with the help of five women incarcerated in Maison Tanguay. The dance recital was accompanied by video images taken during a similar experience in a women’s prison in a suburb of Paris. This was a work of art created around the themes of imprisonment, the body and its ability to move beyond in a different manner.  It was a show that marked the spirit of its spectators and that has kept people talking at Maison Tanguay three years later — as if it was yesterday.

To learn more, please consult our Bulletin Femmes & Justice du printemps 2005.

This project was supported by the Correctional Service of Canada, Tanguay Prison and financed by the Minister of French Culture.

At the Joliette Institution

Two years after her experience at Maison Tanguay Claire Jenny,  choreographer and  french artistic director of the dance company Point Virgule, came back to Quebec to put into place a new creative choreographic project, mixing six incarcerated women with a troupe of quebec dancers from the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM).  The project was entitled « De-tension ».

“Claire Jenny brings more than 10 years of experience to the carceral milieu.  Her creative work attemps to connect what builds or weakens us, questioning the sense of being in this world.  She encourages us to reflect profoundly on the idea of a resilient body capable of becoming strong again.  She creates a choreographic language where the sensitive body is at the heart of self knowledge, far beyond pain.  She develops a project of restitution of feelings of self, the first step in the reconstruction of oneself by singular self-expression.”   Nathalie Schulmann

With the help of a video camera, her friend and colleague Margaux Murray documented the work of creation as well as the show given at Joliette Institution.