Fortune Nation
Simon Laroche & Liliane Moussa
Fortune Nation unfolds as a dream and a ceremony with its own time and rhythm. Through gestures that resist clarity and permanence, this work positions itself within a kind of sci-fi anthropology, observing and imagining life forms whose codes we cannot fully decipher. Invisible bodies and invisible labor, operating on waste of the future, remnants that do not fit the logic of utility. The two figures of Fortune Nation are guardians or caretakers— ungendered, unattached, and uncultured. They appear as excess bodies, chrysalis-like, draped in layers of scavenged hues, shifting between states of becoming, dissolving, and reassembling—never fixed, never fully knowable.
Formally, the work aims to avoid the recognizable and predictable. Body language rejects productivity and intention, unfolding in hesitancy but in continual doing. It evades the parametric and the quantifiable, favoring gestures that loop without pattern, sometimes incorporating fractured language that drifts. Synchronicities emerge and dissolve, the apparent chaos becoming the material through which the choreography dismantles expectations and composes estranged forms of order. Ghosts hover around.
Fortune Nation seeks to position its audience as voyeurs. They peer into a space alive with activity, where meaning resists capture yet an invisible logic operates – a space suspended in its own rite, closer to reverie than to reason. The work perhaps reflects on what we dismiss when it lacks purpose or utility, on how strangeness can render things unseen. Through poetic disruption, Fortune Nation becomes an invitation to linger in what cannot be assimilated.
Co-production
Simon Laroche and Montréal Danse first met during the creation of RADIOMATON, where the transdisciplinary artist revealed his innovative approach at the intersection of immersive technologies and performance. This initial collaboration naturally evolved into Fortune Nation, an ambitious project he is developing with choreographer Liliane Moussa, both united by a common vision: to push the boundaries of physicality in the contemporary choreographic landscape.
The company recognizes in Simon and Liliane’s work the quest for innovation that has characterized its own approach for nearly forty years. Fortune Nation does not merely integrate technology into dance; it profoundly questions our relationship to movement in the digital age, creating a choreographic language in which the human body and its digital avatars coexist in the same multiplied reality. This co-production is part of Montréal Danse’s ongoing commitment to supporting artists who, like Simon and Liliane, are rethinking the frameworks of dance creation and opening up new territories of expression for the performing arts.
Première
Processus
Coproduction
Montréal Danse
GALERIE
CREDITS
Creation and performance
Simon Laroche & Liliane Moussa
Dramaturgy
Kathy Casey
Costume design: Marie-Audrey Jacques
Sound device design
Anne-F Jacques and Simon Laroche
Software development
Samuël Lefebvre
ETS Researcher
David Labbé
Research collaboration
Claire Pearl, Emile Pineault, Marine Rixhon, Audrey Rochette, Emmalie Ruest, Alanna Kraaijeveld