Photo — Rolline Laporte
Exploring the archetypal elements of femininity, NYX is inspired by teenage memories of the family women’s clothing business: the world of the women whose lives unfolded there; the little hands of the seamstresses; and the guidance and pronouncements of Johanne Madore’s grandmother, the reigning matriarch on that « ship » laden with fabrics, skins and furs.
Representing generosity, wisdom and generational change, this matriarch’s death at the age of 106 sparked the creative process of the show NYX, named in reference to the Greek goddess of the night. From then on, the worlds began to blur: embroiderers of memories and sometimes fantasies act as female shamans guiding the souls who are lost between death and birth, between Eros and Thanatos, through the winding forest, through the darkness of the night, through the kingdom of NYX.
After her passing, Johanne Madore’s grandmother came to represent a different NYX: a mythological mother of the night and of dreams who watches over intuition and memory, the sacred and the feminine—celebrating a nature that’s both savage and spiritual and questioning time, the body, and the “soul” that gives it life.
« I wanted to create an organic, theatrical night in which human spirits meet beasts emerging from the stories of my childhood, rewiring my memories from the vast dark place—this « ship’s hold » / warehouse of materials from the family store—and fabricating within it priestly and erotic bodies, new floating chimeras that undergo transformation between the chrysalidal lining of NYX’s sails. » — Johanne Madore
