The Evocative Compagnie Virginie Brunelle Makes its Philadelphia Debut with Fables
Dance Penn Live Arts Debuts Philadelphia Debuts U.S. Premiere
Hailed as a fresh voice in contemporary dance and a rising star on the international scene, Virginie Brunelle and her eponymous dance company make their Philadelphia debut Feb 20-21 with Fables, a soul-stirring, emotionally driven, full-length dance theatre work that explores feminism.
Virginie Brunelle
After studying violin throughout her childhood, Brunelle took her first dance class at the age of twenty at the University of Quebec and discovered that her real calling was choreography. She graduated in 2008 and created her first work Les cuisses à L’écart du cœur, that same year. Encouraged by its success, she founded her company just one year later.
Following its founding, Brunelle’s company has won the 2017 Prix du public for Foutrement (2010); earned second prize at the Aarhus International Choreography Competition in Denmark for Complexe des genres (2011); and performed several major works in over 50 cities in Europe and North America. In addition to stage works, Brunelle recently directed her first award-winning short film, Réminiscences (2022), featuring three sensual duets, which was screened at 30 dance film festivals.
Brunelle tackles thorny issues—feminism, gender identities, violence, death and mourning—with gusto. Her work is about the human condition—pain, fragility, hope, the search for truth and the beauty that dwells within. She notes, “Creation is my way to sublimate what could be the negative atmosphere around me, to answer my questions and share them with a group of people. Through dance, I am not necessarily searching for answers, but my goal is to create a dialogue with people through movement.”
Fables
Fables premiered at the 2022 Lugano Dance Project Festival in Switzerland, was presented at the Théâtre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts in Montréal later that year and, most recently, was part of the prestigious Biennale Danza in Venice in 2025.
The inspiration for Fables was largely drawn from the Lugano festival’s theme, which centered on Monte Verità, the site of an idealistic community in the early twentieth century. The micro-society was interested in creating a new life based on freedom, simplicity, cooperation and a vegetarian diet, and it is considered a precursor to the hippie counterculture that emerged in the 1960s. The “Mount,” as it was called, became a cultural mecca for artists, intellectuals and reformers, including Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, Carl Jung, Hermann Hesse, Paul Klee, Rudolf Steiner and Max Picard. As dance lovers, we credit Duncan’s free-spirited style, Wigman’s unforgettable expressiveness and von Laban’s system of Labanotation, or documenting human movement, for pioneering the foundation for modern dance.
Brunelle was most interested in the feminist and utopian ideals that Monte Verità fostered. From this spark, she created a rousing, evocative and, at times, harsh 65-minute work for ten dancers to live music by pianist Laurier Rajotte. The choreography features powerful tableaux, energetic duets, memorable characters of female archetypes, panting gestures, compelling imagery and all that encompasses theatrical dance. One scene features a woman in a huge white dress, her face in pain with two naked bodies emerging from the skirt. Another segment shows a woman bounded by black bands attached to a structure. She is struggling to move but has limited space to do so. Then, there are more utopian moments such as an ensemble section featuring dancers in sequin outfits on stools where they sit, turn, twist, jump and triumphantly dance together in unison. There is nudity, violence, tenderness.
Janet Smith (Stir) beautifully sums up Brunelle’s work, “As for the dancers? Wow. They bare their souls and commit fully to the physical and emotional demands here, crossing back and forth between fragility and harshness.”
I, for one, cannot wait to experience this fascinating U.S. premiere. See you there on Feb 20-21.
Anne-Marie Mulgrew, MFA, is an Education/Marketing Consultant for Penn Live Arts and the Artistic Director of Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers Company.
