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Thursday-Saturday, January 22-24 - 8:00 pm
Scotiabank Dance Centre
A speech can be a mighty weapon, rallying crowds and unleashing feverish action, and Lisbeth Gruwez’s brilliantly conceived solo exposes the transformation of both the speaker and the audience. Taking fragments from a recording by ultraconservative American televangelist Jimmy Swaggert, she dances the growing frenzy of ecstatic speaking.
Initially the speech is friendly and pacifying, but from the compulsive desire to convince comes growing despair, eventually betraying its deepest nature: violence. Gruwez exploits the dialogue between dance and sound, words and gesture, to reveal the nature of fanaticism, the dangerous charisma of orators, and their hypnotic hold over listeners, in a spellbinding performance which has toured the world to critical acclaim.