Samuel Tétreault, hand-balancer and co-founder/co-artistic director of Les 7 Doigts de le Main
Award-winning hand-balancer Samuel Tétreault graduated from National Circus School in his home city of Montreal in 1996. While there he developed a passion for dance and theatre as well as circus. He toured with Cirque du Soliel's Alegria, performing more than 1,500 shows and also with Cirque Eloize's Cirque Orchestra. In 2002 he co-founded Les 7 Doigts de la Main – known as The 7 Fingers – and co-created and performed in many of their shows, including Loft and La Vie.
Samuel now directs and appears in Triptyque – three encounters between circus and dance – choreographed by Marie Chouinard, Victor Quijada and Marcos Morau. He tells Liz Arratoon about the show, what it takes to get to the top and the part his younger sister played in his choice of career. Triptyque runs at Sadler's Wells in London on 1 and 2 April.
The Widow Stanton: You started at the Montreal school at 14, was that full time? Samuel Tétreault: Yes. I had no acrobatic experience whosoever before I went there. If you think of ballet dancers or gymnasts, they start very young, so I was in a way already a bit old to start any kind of acrobatic training. But I was really passionate so I still managed to achieve the level of skills and flexibility required. That was the first year they were doing a kind of scholarship programme and the academic work was integrated into the circus programme. Nowadays this is an institutional programme; kids can start at 12 and do five years of high school and three years of a professional diploma but if you come from a dance, gymnastics or acrobatic background you can just do the three years.
What had led you there? Is there any showbiz in your family? No, but strangely enough my dad was a contemporary art gallery director and curator so there was some kind of artistic connection to my family. Our house was filled with modern art, sculptures and paintings. When I was a kid I was always very physical and leant very much towards sports. I was passionate about ice hockey; I was a goal keeper. That was my dream as a kid. I wanted to go to the Olympics and I was looking for the right sport that would fit my body type.
Eventually I discovered circus through my younger sister, who'd been doing gymnastics, then started going to the circus school in Montreal, which had just opened. At first I just enjoyed the physicality of going to the school and learning special skills and things that made me feel a bit different. Of course, when you're a teenager you want to find your own identity so that was great to feel that I was doing something marginal, original and so on.
In 1989 my sister was chosen to go for a one-week kind of internship with Cirque du Soleil and we went to Quebec City and got to see behind the scenes, the training, and saw the same show – Le Cirque Réinventé – three times so we suddenly understood what showbusiness was; you see them warming up, you go backstage and see the show from the wings and that was when I realised this could actually be my life. I had kind of a revelation. I was like, 'Wow! This is really cool. This is not circus as I had imagined it before, with animals and bearded women and that kind of stuff'. It was emotionally engaging. That's when I started nourishing the dream to become a circus performer.
Why did you choose hand-balancing? I remember seeing in that show a hand-to-hand duo, a French couple doing a bit of a tumble-inspired hand-to-hand. At first I was really in love with the hand-to-hand but the guy was also doing a sequence where he was balancing on one arm on the floor, pressing up into a one-arm handstand, and hopping just on one arm and doing a full circle. This was the most amazing skill I had ever seen. I was like, 'Wow! This is what I want to do'. I was naturally drawn to it.
Can you explain a bit about the training for someone thinking of taking it up? When I think about it, hand balancing requires a lot of patience and a lot of precision. I stayed at the school for an extra year because it takes a lot of time to really master. I'm someone who who can be very analytical and quite obsessive things and I'll just keep working until it works. The training takes a lot of time and in a way it's very repetitive and you just need to be so aware of little details and alignments and subtle things. It just corresponded to my personality and to my body type. I don't have explosive muscle fibres that allow me to do tumbling, then jump and do a double back flip, I have slower and more stretchy fibres that are good for hand-to-hand. And naturally when you're good at something you like it [laughs].
How many hours day would you train? Back then at the circus school we were having quite full days. We'd have three or four hours of academic classes, dancing, acting and then I would train probably between four and five hours of hand-balancing every day. Then we'd have general acrobatic class, flexibility, a bit of juggling.
But you also developed a passion for dance there… When I started at the circus school I had a friend who was a bit older who was working as an usher at the Place des Arts, the national arts centre in Montreal and he would get free tickets. He used to invite me all the time and that's when I started to become really curious and saw so many dance shows there, from Jiri Kylián with Nederlands Dans Theater, Trisha Brown, and Alvin Ailey. La La La Human Steps was already very exciting. It was the early 90s so it was just the beginning of the rise of Édouard Lock.
There are a few shows that I remember really inspired me and influenced me a lot to a point where I really considered becoming a dancer. Back then the contemporary circus was still very young and dance was already exciting and researching richer and more varied artistic propositions. But I realised I would have more to say as a acrobat who loved dancing and sees the circus work as something that can be blended with choreographic work, than being a dancer who knows how to do a back flip. I'm very happy with the choices I made and to feel with Triptyque that I'm coming full circle and finally getting an opportunity to create a show that really merges these two art forms.
So was it you who instigated this collaboration with the world of dance? I've always nourished a passion for dance. I've taken lots of classes, workshops and master classes all the way through my career and I've always had the approach with whatever shows I was creating that I was developing a bit of a choreographic language using the acrobatic skills and treating a circus act like a little dance piece with its own choreographic signature. So in a way that has been there for a long time, for all the acts I've created and because I love dancing and saw a lot of shows in Montreal I'd run into this dance producer, Daniel Soulières of Danse-Cité, at every dance premiere and we started talking about doing a collaboration one day.
In 2012 I got injured and started enjoying directing a lot in that year and I directed a lot more, but I also realised I still really wanted to be onstage and when I felt better I felt the urge to fulfil all these dreams I want to accomplish before maybe becoming a full-time director. Daniel gave me the opportunity to choose the choreographers I wanted and assemble the cast.
Is Triptyque the first time The 7 Fingers have used outside choreographers? Yes, its entirely new for us. Usually we are the artistic directors of our shows and we direct and create everything. Now my role is really more of an artistic director. I had the desire to explore the choreographic universes and the creative universes of different choreographers, so I thought, 'Let's do a triptych. And if I'm going to do that, let's do it right and really seize the opportunity to discover more than one choreographer's universe'. So I came up with idea of using three.
Tell us about the three pieces. I picked the choreographers with the idea of having a bit of a progression between the three pieces, both in terms of number of people onstage, but also in the relationship between circus and dance. So the first piece – Anne & Samuel – was going to be a duet. When we confirmed that we were going to do something with Marie Chouinard, it was clear that it was going to be her work. So I knew it was going to be closer to contemporary dance and a lot less acrobatic and circussy. That was fine because I really had that desire to work as a dancer and explore that side of my performance without having to kind of use the acrobatic skills to feel like I'm allowed to be onstage. So the first piece is a duet; very contemporary.
Variations 9.81, the second piece, is a quintet. I'd say a 50/50 blend between circus and dance and it's a piece that's just using hand-balancing technique combined with dancing. The idea was to create a new choreographic language between the acrobatic skills and the dancing. This was created with Victor Quijada. Victor comes from the breakdance world as much as classical ballet and contemporary dance, and his approach to movement is really unique. He calls his technique the RUBBERBANDance method and if there was one choreographer who could best understand what it means to be balancing on your hands, then it was Victor.
With his really strong background as a breakdancer, he knows what's it like to be upside down. It was really a laboratory of exploration with the bodies of the hand-balancers being upside down. How can you create the same kind of movements with your legs that's he's using with dancers? So, it's still very much a dance piece. In a way it's very abstract and doesn't really have a strong dramatic line. It's really about the shapes and the movement qualities. What makes it very exciting and special is that I believe it's the first time you have five very strong hand-balancers who have such mastery that you can really push the hand-balancing work with the choreography.
And the final piece? Nocturnes is a dance ensemble with all eight performers. It's choreographed and co-directed with Marcos Morau and Isabelle Chassé [7 Fingers co-founder], who was assisting me. It's Marcos' piece in terms of the choreographic work but in terms of the artistic visions and developing a bit of the storyline it was done a bit more as we normally do it with 7 Doigts, kind of creative tandem or collective creation. What I wanted with this piece was to have it a bit more theatrical; there's a bit of text, there's a bit more of a dramatic through line, there are some characters who are very theatrical and that's usually the type of work we do with 7 Fingers.
My idea was to have this progression that would allow the meeting of the dance public with the circus public. I wanted to surprise the circus people and get them out of their comfort zone and to have them experience something entirely different to what they're used to seeing with the 7 Fingers. And for the dance people I wanted to gradually take them more and more towards circus.
Even though the three pieces are very different the main theme I proposed to all three choreographers was our relationship to gravity. Gravity is looked at from a very physical point of view, a force that pulls us to the ground without which dance and circus couldn't exist, but also I wanted to explore the more figurative and metaphorical relationship that we have to gravity. The fact that in Marie's piece we use crutches and become quadrupeds is really a very literal way for me to explore gravity and dancing.
Are some of the cast members dancers? There's a mix between circus artists and dancers. I wanted to have both. There are five who are more from circus, there are two dancers who have never done any acrobatics and one hand-balancer who has been working as a dancer with RUBBERBANDance for the last five years. I wanted to have some moments in the show that would really allow the dance work to shine in a way that would showcase the virtuosity of a body that's spent a whole lifetime training to become a dancer. We're good movers but we don't have the same understanding and the subtlety and control of each bone and muscle to make them move in a cool way.
I also wanted circus performers with amazing physical skills that no dancer could achieve. I wanted to be truthful to both art forms but I also wanted to have the dancers bring there own perspective into the acrobatic research and vice versa. For example when we worked on the aerial double straps act I just couldn't get what I wanted with two acrobats and one day I tried one acrobat and one dancer and within an hour they'd found so much exciting work that had never been done before and it needed a dancer to be upside down on straps for the first time to just see how they could dance like that. That opened a new door of choreographic research using straps. The same thing happened when we combined two dancers with a crystal-ball juggler. There was such a choreographic complexity and it was something entirely new.
You speak with such enthusiasm for his show, would you say it's been the high spot of your work with Les 7 Doigts? Definitely! But I believe that every time I create something it's the high spot, for sure. [Laughs] I think my journey as a performer and as a creator with 7 Doigts led me to this, so yes, it is one of the most exciting things I've done.
Picture credits: Les 7 Doigts de la Main/Alexandre Galliez
Triptyque runs at Sadler's Wells in London on 1 and 2 April.
For tickets click here
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