Taking as its point of departure the October 2015 restaging of PPS Danse’s iconic 1993 piece Bagne, this presentation seeks to explore multiple layers attendant to queer performance in Québec’s dance and circus scenes. As we have just celebrated Canada’s sesquicentennial and Montreal’s 375th anniversary, it seems important to examine what happens when signal pieces of the past are brought back into the present. Bagne had been noted at its 1993 premiere as bringing a homoeroticism to Montreal’s stages. This work’s restaging thus gives us the occasion to look into queer histories and presences that move across time and genre, including vital connections to Montreal’s globally influential circus worlds. As the critical press has claimed this piece to be a “masterpiece of Québécois dance” now brought to new audiences, we may discover that this queer-flavoured performance ends up revealing much about contemporary creation and re-creation in Québec.

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