Fortune Nation

Fortune Nation unfolds as a dream and a ceremony with its own time and rhythm. Through gestures that resist clarity and permanence, this work positions itself within a kind of sci-fi anthropology, observing and imagining life forms whose codes we cannot fully decipher. Invisible bodies and invisible labor, operating on waste of the future, remnants that do not fit the logic of utility. The two figures of Fortune Nation are guardians or caretakers— ungendered, unattached, and uncultured. They appear as excess bodies, chrysalis-like, draped in layers of scavenged hues, shifting between states of becoming, dissolving, and reassembling—never fixed, never fully knowable.

Formally, the work aims to avoid the recognizable and predictable. Body language rejects productivity and intention, unfolding in hesitancy but in continual doing. It evades the parametric and the quantifiable, favoring gestures that loop without pattern, sometimes incorporating fractured language that drifts. Synchronicities emerge and dissolve, the apparent chaos becoming the material through which the choreography dismantles expectations and composes estranged forms of order. Ghosts hover around.

Fortune Nation seeks to position its audience as voyeurs. They peer into a space alive with activity, where meaning resists capture yet an invisible logic operates – a space suspended in its own rite, closer to reverie than to reason. The work perhaps reflects on what we dismiss when it lacks purpose or utility, on how strangeness can render things unseen. Through poetic disruption, Fortune Nation becomes an invitation to linger in what cannot be assimilated.

Born out of a collaboration between dance and performance artist Liliane Moussa and transdisciplinary artist Simon Laroche, the project began during an artist residency at the École de Technologie Supérieure in Montreal, in collaboration with researcher David Labbé and his research group in computer engineering and health sciences.

Credits

Creation and performance
Simon Laroche
Liliane Moussa

Costumes design
Marie-Audrey Jacques

Sound devices design
Anne F Jacques
Simon Laroche

Dramaturgy
Kathy Casey

Associated researcher ÉTS
David Labbé

Software development
Samuël Lefevbre

Photos
Kinga Michalska

Video
Eric Berthiaume

Co-production
Projet EVA
Montréal Danse
École de Technologie Supérieure