Festival Cultural de Mayo Jalisco 2012

We appreciate the collaboration of Cirque du Soleil
for the presentation of this exhibition.

Place: Instituto Cultural Cabañas
Time: 20:30 h
Admission: Entrance fee

Produced bypor: InformAction
Director: Carlos Ferrand

The Festival of Mayo presents the exhibition Dominique Lemieux. Imagining Characters. Through drawings, sketches, preparatory notes, accessories and photographs, the beginnings of a narration unfold in which the costumes define the different characters of spectacular performances.

The exhibition is a testimony to an innate sense of balance, a play between arranging masses of color and black and white lines. Through dynamic gestures, the artist transports us to a powerful universe of designs for characters, the majority of which were included the spectacular performances that have been presented by Cirque du Soleil from its beginnings, through her signature costumes for shows between 1989 and 1998, among them are: Saltimbanco (1992), Mystère (1993), Alegría (1994), Quidam (1996), «O» (1998) and La Nouba (1998). In 2005, she returned with Corteo (2005), then Zaia (2008) and Banana Shpeel (2009).

Dominique Lemieux values the specific techniques she uses in her initial sketches where different narratives begin to take form. Pencil, watercolor, pastel and charcoal are among these. In the last few years, she has started to use current technologies.

Lili Michaud, the exhibition curator, describes Dominique Lemieux as a true innovator who offers us a myriad of enchanting and moving actors and acrobats. Through her “gallery” of characters, the artist constantly surprises us and invites us to look again at her work.

Lemieux finds her inspiration in a world of music and rhythm and the costumes evolve as she gets to know the actors and tries to adapt her designs to the personalities of those acrobats. The artist’s creations standout for her attention to, and preoccupation with, both the form and function of the clothing and accessories. She takes great care in analyzing how the fabric will react when in contact with the acrobats’ skin and their movements, without compromising her artistic goals of transporting the audience to a world of color, illusion and beauty. The designs, always in tandem with the vision of the director, are filled with passion and deep sensibility.

Curator: Lili Michaud.

The golden thread tying all Dominique Lemieux’s projects together leads us through exploring the interior world of humankind: fear, desire and courage…

She undertakes each of her projects like an ocean-going voyage — solidarity and team spirit are essential in order to create a universe of emotions.

In love with drawing since childhood, she received an education in fine arts and design at Concordia University in Montreal, while active as an illustrator of children’s books at the same time.She then studied scenography at the National Theatre School of Canada, notably with François Barbeau, renowned costume designer.

By 1987, a costume designer in her own right, one can see her creations on stage at the theatre in productions by René-Richard Cyr, Roland Laroche, Yvette Brin d’Amour, Paola de Vasconcelos, Denise Filiatrault and many others. She also took part in creating the costumes for the Grand Ballets Canadiens de Montreal’s Nutcracker.

In 1988 Ms Lemieux went on to design the costumes for the Cirque du Soleil’s second show. She became one of the troupe’s most faithful contributors, participating in the creation of seven triumphant productions such as Nouvelle Experience, Saltimbanco, Mystere, Alegria, Quidam, «O» and La Nouba.

In 2003 she created the costumes for Céline Dion’s A New Day in Las Vegas with Franco Dragone. In 2005, again with the Cirque, she designed costumes for the Cirque’s Corteo production with Daniele Finzi Pasca.

Since 2006 Ms Lemieux regularly mentors students from Fashion Colleges and Universities such as Otis College or Art and Design in Los Angeles and Ryerson University’s Faculty of Fashion Design in Toronto.

Lili Michaud is the founding director of Occurrence, espace d’art et
d’essai contemporains, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Since the founding
of Occurrence in 1989, she has initiated and managed numerous
projects in collaboration with national and international centers in order to show the works of Quebec artists abroad, including Mexico, Brazil and Europe. From these collaborations, she has also hosted international artists and their projects. In 2001, she had the great
pleasure to meet the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo to consequently present his work at Occurrence in 2002, an exhibition entitled Que el mundo es pequeño (What a small world).

The project was developed in collaboration with El Centro de la Imagen, Mexico and the Mexican Consulate in Montreal, Quebec. She also coordinated the Canadian circulation of the exhibition Fauna Secreta on Joan Fontcuberta’s work between 1999 and 2001.

Recently, she has coordinated the exhibition Résonance: le projet Corps électromagnétiques (Resonance: The Electromagnetic Bodies Project) that toured several museums in Europe, notablythe European House of Photography in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany and the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid, Spain. She has participated in several panels including the Council of Arts and Letters of Quebec and the City of Montreal. Lili Michaud studied art history and animation and cultural research at the University of Quebec in Montreal as well as costume art at the College Notre-Dame-de-Foy in Cap Rouge, Quebec, in the late 70s.

Her passion for stage costumes could not have found a more relevant outcome than the research she conducted on the work of Dominique Lemieux.!