CREATED BY The Collective Brahmine
PRODUCED BY Les filles Electriques
PRESENTED AT La Sala Rosa Montreal
“The audience seeing the strings isn’t a problem. What matters is sincerity.”
Founded in 2008 by D. Kimm the collective Brahmine creates shows around performance, projection, installation, music, shadow theatre, marionettes, automats, and hybrid objects. The goal is to bring together artists with a hands-on, playful approach who put materials, space, content and the relationship with the performative act into question. The collective is influenced by the work of inventors and performers like Robert-Houdin, and by everything strange and on the fringe. It draws freely on the aesthetic of the curiosity cabinet and the tableau vivant and the 19th-century taste for spiritualism and the occult, as well as on the atmosphere of the American “side-show” and the freaks made famous by P.T. Barnum.
Featuring Marcelle Hudon, 2boys.tv (Aaron Pollard and Stephen Lawson), Mobile Home (Lucas Jolly and Steeve Dumais), ZAL (Mélanie Charest and Pierre Potvin), Brigitte Henry, D. Kimm, and Martine H. Crispo.
The group’s greatest source of inspiration, however, is George Méliès, who before going on to invent his cinematic processes, was a conjuror specializing in automats and “grand illusions”. Méliès’s approach shows an affinity with a certain kind of interdisciplinarity and the emerging practices in which we are working. Above all, his “hands-on” resourcefulness is something we cherish.