An intimate, postmodern two-hander that turns deconstructed wedding gowns and breath-synced blindness into one of Fringe’s most rigorously made pieces of dance theatre.
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[ Reviews · Montréal · June 2026 ]
An intimate, postmodern two-hander that turns deconstructed wedding gowns and breath-synced blindness into one of Fringe’s most rigorously made pieces of dance theatre.
Reviewed by Aubrey Wang
The Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui houses la parole of Québec; decades of new francophone playwriting at the most literary address in the city. You're welcomed into a stylish foyer buzzing with Québécois, and led into a cavernous theatre with generously raked seats.
10 minutes plus tard, you're watching something totally psychonautic. Two ripped Amazons converse through movement alone, aglow in ritualistic lighting. All while becoming progressively undressed.
Are they fighting? Undergoing a spiritual marriage? Staging a Manichean encounter?
It’s all the more impressive, really, that even without any cognizable plot points the dance piece told a well-shaped story. It held and deflated tension at the right moments; it knew exactly where to place the humor amidst the rage and tenderness.
It maintains, above all else, an intentionally designed audience experience — without losing any of its focus or intimacy.
The show is Le début des yeux / Everything is Sparkle Sparkle, made by Glamour Magique, a Montreal performance duo who co-direct, co-choreograph, co-design. Rafa Tremblay-van Zuiden came to dance by way of the École de cirque de Verdun (juggling, aerial acrobatics) and a biology degree, and now is working on a graduate thesis which concerns the wedding dress.
(Both the dress and the biology have made it into the show. You've been warned.)
Rafa's costume design is deconstructed bridal: skirts running from gathered champagne satin to sheer trailing gauze, all raw-edged and rebuilt onto half-naked bodies (it reminded me of the Australian label Diaspora). The sequences plays with the bridal veil in multiple configurations, sometimes as bonnet, sometime balaclava.
His partner, Christian Brun del Re, has danced Anna Halprin, who more or less invented postmodern dance, and Tamara Cubas’s political choreography at Festival TransAmériques. Brun del Re also composed this show’s score.
The dance vocabulary covers an impressive dynamic range, sudden then sustained, bound then free. You can see the postmodern influences: the pedestrian gesture set against the trained one, task-based sequences accruing by accumulation until a motif has been developed.
Montréal is known for insane physical feats, but the most impressive circus trick in this show is one of attunement — the dancers are responsive to each other down to a milli-second, in expressions and micro-gestures as well as the larger movements.
At one point, the two performers synchronize on breath alone — literally. They'd taped an umbilical tube made from god-knows-what to their mouths. Despite the dark stockings pulled over their eyes, the performers were still able to intuit where the other is in space, blind, sensing only via mouth-breathing. It’s a circus show, except the spectacle is the intimacy.
The image in the mirror is not you. When amateurs do mirroring exercises (like Meisner at drama school) they assume the point is to become identical. Le début des yeux / Everything is Sparkle Sparkle dances the counterpoint. A mirroring is not just one person copying another, even if they happen to be wearing identical veterinarian cones.
They begin with mirroring as conversation. Then partnering takes over: weight-sharing, the matador and the bull, contact passed back and forth like two separate listenings. Only dancers know rotational symmetry.
Why waste a bilingual title on making the same argument twice? Again, the symmetry without the sameness. “Le début des yeux”, French, probably to do with an etiology of looking; “Everything is Sparkle Sparkle” is the English half, an incantation growled with warrior-like vitriol at the start of the show.
Once you clock that the four-pointed sparkle is now the ubiquitous symbol for AI, you clock the critique. A similar wit drives a swing-scored send-up of corporate America performed mid-juggle, and a giant novelty cheque for $100,000 MONTREAL FRINGE.
Six content warnings hang off a forty-five-minute duo (violence, pornography, death, substance abuse, war, mental health). While the dance narrative takes a progressive stance, and broaches taboo social issues with confidence, I felt the warnings to have been less about content and more about what the show was doing to my nervous system. Implicated, at once in awe and terror, and fully converted.
The dramaturgy is tight and the lighting builds incantation on incantation. Cinq étoiles. J’ai peur, in the best possible way.
Reviewed by Aubrey Wang
Le début des yeux / Everything is Sparkle Sparkle
Creation, direction, choreography & design Glamour Magique
Performers Christian Brun del Re, Rafa Tremblay-van Zuiden
Original music Christian Brun del Re
Costume design Rafa Tremblay-van Zuiden
Running time 45 minutes
Rating 16+
Content warnings violence, pornography, death, substance abuse, war, mental health
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