Manon Labrecque studied dance and art in Canada. Since 1988 she has produced performances and choreography in galleries and theatres. Her first video 'Amusement Park' dates back to 1992, since when she has made videos regularly. Her works include 'The Friends of Anguish' (1995), 'This Side of the Real' (1997) and 'Hara Kiri (exercise)' (1998). The noted Canadian periodical 'Parachute' devoted an extensive article to her work in its most recent issue.1) The abiding theme of Labrecque's work is the integration of body and movement. 'Amusement Park' immediately set the tone. A female drifter is sitting on a bench in a public park. She gets up to leave, but try as she may she is unable to get out of the picture. As soon as she approaches the edge of the frame she is flung violently back into the picture. She is imprisoned in the monitor, the plaything of invisible external forces who perhaps also represent some sort of irony of fate. Ross writes about this in 'Parachute': "In Labrecque's videography, the off-screen is a non-place that the subject is forced to avoid: it is the site of a prohibition or a non-possible. The subject does not exist outside of the camera; the camera brings the subject into existence." Video for the sake of video, therefore. This also allows Labrecque to toy with her figures and to plunge them into strange situations of helplessness and torment. The nice thing about Lebrecque's work is that its humour never gets too black, although powerlessness and depression seem to be the everyday fare of her female figures. Their struggle for freedom looks just as hopeless, ridiculous and heroic as the struggle against gravity itself, "[...] provoking a whole array of somatic spasms: the distortion of the faces, contraction, suspension, the fall and panicking of the body, jerky fragmentation of perception. It is the hysterical performance - and not the cybernetic performance - which prevails as potential for the perpetual identity-based re-signification of the self." (Ross). 'It's Today...' is still best described as a home video that gets progessively out of hand; a strange and enchanting combination of everyday life and inner craziness, where the world seems to be spinning round and perception remains in dizzy suspension.
1. Christine Ross, Contemporary knots: the videography of Manon Labrecque, in: Mouvances de l'image/Image Shifts, Parachute 103, 2001, pp.108-126
– Marianne Brouwer
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