By Martin Messier

Martin Messier’s Innervision exemplifies his multidisciplinary practice, in which dance, digital art and sound art meet.

Spectators are invited to participate in a monumental outdoor project, a living sculpture embodied by 60 dancers who are directed live by Messier via an individualized wireless system. Capturing his voice, the performers, in an aggregate mass and all dressed in black, pulsate as a single body, swelling and retracting, surging forward or going to ground. We are made to feel all the strength of the group, the social body: malleable matter, docile yet indomitable.

Inside this human wave that penetrates the audience and deploys the choreography, each dancer responds to Messier’s instructions as if guided by an inner voice, finding a balance between obedience and free choice.

Each performer holds a stone, the quintessential raw material, a reminder of the world’s beginnings, our origins, and the power of nature at the heart of a space submerged by technology. They manipulate the stones, rub them, drop them, toss and catch them, the repetition of these simple gestures evoking a portent of the future of humanity and the struggles to come.

This stripped-down, minimalist work incarnates a dialogue between interiority and exteriority, between human beings – what we carry within us and where we come from – and the external world, nature, with which we interact. 

“Innervision is a show not to be missed [...] It goes beyond just being a contemporary dance piece.”
—Rédaction, MTLWAY.com, 31-05-2019

“Innervision definitely tests the definition of the term “choreographed” as the movements, though they all happen together, are being orchestrated live.”
—Tyler Jadah, DailyHive.com, 30-05-2019

« Pendant 30 minutes, les 60 interprètes ont pulsé, bougé, cillé, voire respiré dans un synchronisme hypnotisant. [...] Entre le chef d’orchestre et sa troupe, la symbiose est parfaite. »
« Les mouvements, décuplés par l’effet du nombre, évoquaient tantôt une machine humaine aux gestes précis, tantôt une masse grouillante qui s’unissait pour mieux se séparer. »
—Stéphanie Morin, La Presse +, 30-05-2019

« Innervision adopte le style et le ton nécessaires pour capter l’attention des passants sur une grande place publique et les maintenir dans un état de concentration suffisant pour qu’ils apprécient non seulement la performance, mais réfléchissent aussi à sa portée. »
—Daphnée Bathalon, Montheatre.qc.ca, 31-05-2019

« Des lumières vives et intermittentes, une bande-son pulsatile et puissante. (...) Trente minutes de ballet urbain, primitif et ultracontemporain, accessible à tous. »
—Marie Baudet, Lalibre.be (Belgique), 05-06-2019