amilton de azevedo writes about Floreus, by Sébastien Provencher (Canada), premiered in the 2024 Festival TransAmériques (FTA – Tiohtià:ké/Montreal). this text is part of a special coverage; the critic traveled to Canada at the invitation of the FTA.

The audience wander around and sit on the church’s benches as if waiting for the mass. In the chapel of the Cité-des-Hospitalières, a liturgy of another quality is about to begin. Performers are in the galleries above, looking at the spectators movements. One of them slowly plays some long-lasting chords on the piano. Sébastien Provencher’s Floreus (Canada, 2024) is inspired by the work of visual artist Zachari Logan, his flowers and bodies mingling as unsettling oneness.

Logan is in the central corridor, drawing and coloring a long white piece of fabric. In a way, it mirrors the enormous work displayed behind the chapel’s altar. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita“, pastel in black paper, measuring 1,8 x 10 meters, named after the first lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy stands out in the mostly lightly colored ambient with its intricate details. As the seminal book, Floreus is also divided in three parts – and one can think of it as a journey to paradise. But hell and purgatory are filled with beauty and passion; there is no space for sins or guilt in this litany of bodies in relation.

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When Floreus is put in motion, the title is repeated like a mantra in a harmonious chant. As performers (Drew Bathory, Rodney Diverlus, Kizis, Nicholas Bellefleur, Mathieu Hérard and Rony Joaquin Figueroa) slowly walk down the stairs and through the church benches, the piece establishes itself from the beginning as a meditation. As it develops, one can feel it like a meditation and nature and on the nation of desire. Time, distance, composition. Sound, visuality, embodiment, relation, space, space, space. Chapels are usually designed in a way that one feels small before the divinity. In Floreus, what could be perceived as profane is brought to the temple and desire becomes sacred.

The slow-paced choreography by Provencher is a continuous homoerotic flow, building up and sustaining a sexual tension not only between the performers but in the whole audience, constantly being looked upon and approximated by them. As they construct and deconstruct vivid body relations – maintaining the tension as high-voltage as possible – their calm movements create compositions like they are proposing tableaux vivants. In this case, tableaux désireux. 

Brazilian author Nelson Rodrigues once said, during an interview, that “without passion you can’t even suck a popsicle“. Every single gesture of Floreus is impregnated with it, from approaching one another intensely to wearing a sock. The floral design, signed by Marc Sardi, is not only part of the set but becomes a participant of the work. Flowers, symbol of passion, compose within the choreography and the images being produced by it. 

Butterflies are also there; its beauty is sort of conflicted by the artificiality of the prop, as it is nature and it is not – as a chapel can host sacred and profane, life is constantly reminded of death – as of the presence of the buckets and the basic jeans and shirts costumes (by Jonathan Saucier) brings up the daily life and its secrecies and pleasures. Then, for the last part, the garden of the Cité-des-Hospitalières is turned into some kind of heaven. An Eden for the mundane, performers feel the grass and dance nature, joyfully celebrating the passion that inhabits all things.