CREATED BY The Collective Brahmine
PRODUCED BY Les filles Electriques
PRESENTED AT La Sala Rosa, Montreal
After an illustrious evening at the 2009 Festival Voix d’Amériques, the Brahmine collective are back with a new show featuring the strange and the rare – interdisciplinarity as demanding as it is undisciplined – presented by the Robert-Boudin Family. The ten intrepid artists who make up The Collective invite you to join them at the Sala Rossa for a special OFFTA evening in which they will surpass, yet again, the limits of the possible with Le Miracle de Brahmine, le Retour (The Brahmine Miracle Returns).
In this new, “modern” show, Marcelle Hudon, 2boys.tv, ZAL, Mobile Home, Antonin Boudin, Martine H. Crispo and D. Kimm move on from ectoplasm and the occult to explore the astonishing potential of the scientific. Watch as Celestine Boudin demonstrates the world’s first device capable of capturing an image of the human soul! See Rabbit Tamer Mademoiselle Clara, accompanied by her assistant Nounou, as she levitates and yes, teleports! Gasp as low-vision Carolin Boudin, controlled by paper cutouts, performs a death-defying Dance of the Seven Veils, accompanied by the murky amateur Egyptology of Antonin Boudin and the down-home puppetry of Olivette Beaulieu Boudin. Enter the mystery as drawings on a chalkboard begin moving to the sounds of a musical saw, while a man’s face changes with each note in a melancholic possession! Journey into the unconscious as the astounding Mind Travel machine invented by Laurent Boudin makes its world premiere. And for a night that will go down in history, hear the Boudin Family Chorus record a live performance of a classic Hawaiian song onto an authentic 20th-century gramophone! A sweeping panorama of originality, dexterity and tomfoolery.
What Matters is Sincerity
THE BRAHMINE COLLECTIVE shows feature performance, projection, installation, music, shadow puppets, naive magic, automatons and transformed objects. Mixing craft and DIY, its members investigate matter, space and the performative act itself, influenced by the work of inventor-artists such as Robert Houdin and George Méliès, along with everything else strange and marginal. Their aesthetic draws freely on the tradition of the Cabinet of Curiosities and the Tableau Vivant, sometimes with a “freak show” feel.
Critics called their first production poetic, entertaining and disorienting: “a show with all its strings showing”. More romantic than performative perhaps, the Brahmine collective entrance their audiences, enlisting them in old-fashioned but still fascinating processes from the past.
THE BRAHMINE COLLECTIVE are Marcelle Hudon, Stephen Lawson & Aaron Pollard (2boys.tv), Mélanie Charest & Pierre Potvin (ZAL), Lucas Jolly & Steeve Dumais (Mobile Home), Brigitte Henry, Martine H Crispo, and D. Kimm.