Tentacle Tribe’s first Atlanta visit features virtuoso street dance, humor in “Ghost”

On February 25-26, Kennesaw State University’s Department of Dance will host Montreal-based dance company Tentacle Tribe’s first-ever show in Atlanta. (Their January 2022 visit was postponed because of the Covid lockdown in their hometown of Montreal.) The troupe will stage their 2018 work Ghost, which Lincoln Kaye, writing for the Vancouver Observer, describes as “a literally breathtaking 90-minute farrago of sly humour, pure poetry, stunning physical virtuosity and even glimmers of metaphysical depth.”

The artistic directors, Swedish and Canadian collaborators Elon Höglund and Emmanuelle Lê Phan, have worked together since 2005. The two formed Tentacle Tribe in 2012 when Cirque du Soleil commissioned them to create a duet, which was later adapted into a short film, Elon & Emmanuelle, by director Natalie Galazka.  Since its founding, the company has performed internationally in more than 60 cities, but this is Tentacle Tribe’s first United States tour.

Höglund and Lê Phan undertook Ghost as an exploration of the rhythms of respiration. Created for a sextet of Cirque du Soleil veterans, including the directors, it is set to an original score by Samuel Nadai and features Tentacle Tribe’s signature athletic and acrobatic combination of street and contemporary theater dance, and elements drawn from the martial arts.

Through intricate and gravity-defying contact work, the dancers form, deconstruct and reconstruct a constantly evolving series of complex, almost architectural tableaux of bodies. Sometimes the dancers school or flock together as individual units in tightly coordinated group formations. At other times, they seem to merge into a single organism, only to scatter or fracture before regrouping yet again.

Visually, Ghost ranges in tone from heroic, neoclassical grace to uncanny physical humor. The costume design by Rosalie Lemay puts the dancers in comfortable, casual streetwear. Using movement and simple props, dancers conjure a range of forms and images, from classical Greek sculpture to spooky, attenuated and not-quite-human monstrosities.

Widely proclaimed as some of Montreal’s best street dancers, Tentacle Tribe has been the subject of numerous dance films, including the award–winning Vanishing Points (2014), directed by Marites Carino, which has been screened at more than 60 festivals internationally.

A dance-for-film collaboration with Carino, the short Crack the Cypher (2016), used a drone to capture scenes of Tentacle Tribe in motion. In 2020, Jean-Sébastien Ouellet’s 2019 adaptation of Ghost for the cinema screen was an official selection at the 38th Festival International du Film sur l’Art.

Ghost is Tentacle Tribe’s third foray into ensemble choreography. Building on success choreographing duets for themselves, in 2016 Lê Phan and Höglund created Origami Mami for a female trio. Threesixnine, for six dancers, was named Best Choreographic Work of 2017-2018 by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. In 2019, Tentacle Tribe premiered a number of shorter works, including Synecdoche, Fil Rouge and Puzzle, which also featured larger groups of up to 10 dancers.

Tentacle Tribe promises to be a crowd-pleaser for both longtime patrons of dance and those who simply are looking forward to live performance after the pandemic lockdown. Shows will be at the Dance Theater on Kennesaw State University’s Marietta campus, Friday and Saturday, February 25-26, at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $15. Vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals are encouraged to wear a face covering while inside campus facilities. Unvaccinated individuals are strongly encouraged to socially distance while inside campus facilities when possible.

::

Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.