Notre Damn

Notre Damn envisions and stages the descendants of a band of renegade sisters who left England at the end of the 19th century under the pretext of founding a mission in a distant country. Having quickly abandoned their religious vocation for a life of radical independence, three generations of these women express the states and conflicts inherent to their situation: rebellion against clerical authority, motherhood, desire, and the troubling experience of isolation… Notre Damn is a contemporary opera combining the movements of the singing body with a contemporary choreography centred on simple gestures. Here, operatic singing is removed from its usual narrative context to create a more dreamlike and irrational world, depicted through the bodies of the performers. Three remarkable singers, Marie-Annick Béliveau, Anne Julien, and Janet Warrington, engage in this unusual and visceral gestural work… a search for bodily expression that both rivals and reveals that of the voice.