Nathalie Derome

Not easy to bend to the exercise of describing my interdisciplinary work without feeling like I'm rambling. We can say that I've been practicing since 1983. In Quebec, I'm considered an unclassifiable artist and a lighthouse for interdisciplinarity.

Two avenues of research characterize my work: short solo performances destined for contemporary art events and interdisciplinary pieces calling on several artists and shown in theatres. Music, which has always been at the heart of my research, now takes more and more space. In 2000, I launched a first CD of songs: LES 4 RONDS SONT ALLUMÉS, chansons parodisiaques (THE 4 BURNERS ARE ON, parody-sical songs) ) and I am preparing a second one which will be released in the spring of 2004. My work has been seen in Canada, France and in Italy as well as in the United States. One of my creations, DU TEMPS D’ANTENNES (AIR TIME), solo low-tech, has been adapted for a young audience.

Since the beginning, I attempt to draw the world with the contamination and juxtaposition of different disciplines – performance, spoken word, danced movements, music, video, theatre, poetry … For every interdisciplinary show, a different medium guides the writing of the piece and feeds the work formally, becoming the principal reading axis which I unveil at the moment of public presentation by affixing a subtitle to the main title. This way, journalists and producers can access the piece knowing the cause: perforated theatre, music at arms length, river-performance, poem-on-legs, solo low-tech are all examples.

In the eighties, my work was considered to be performance … impure because of its theatre components which characterizes it: texts, costumes, anecdotes … While the theatrical family worries still and always about the apparently chaotic or too poetic dramatic line which constitutes my work, qualifying it, depending on the period, as theatre at risk or sharp theatre (theatre pointu). In 90, when the term interdisciplinarity made its appearance … I felt comfortable. As the year 2000 advances, we are surprised that an artist using so few technological tools claims a place amidst the interdisciplinary tribe. There is perhaps a confusion that sets itself up candidly between multimedia and multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary.

For my part, these days, when I put aside labels and definitions and finally get to work, I attempt to connect notions of the human body and the social body in a piece where music and song will be foregrounded, while continuing to research the frontiers between different disciplines, the practices of make-believe, and the question of territory between people, which can be translated as a question of identity.

The company which supports my projects was born in 1988 under the name La peau des dents (the skin of the teeth), multidisciplinary group, at the moment of the creation of CANADA ERRANT, a long work in progress, bringing together ten artists of all sorts of disciplines (visual arts, theatre, dance, poetry). Even if the company adopted the name of its artistic director to become les Productions Nathalie Derome in 1992, the leitmotiv of the company remains Philosophik + politik = poétik. For my part, it’s always with the feeling of working by the skin of the teeth that I pursue the research which animates and impassions me.