JULIETTE BINOCHE DANCES

FROM THE CANADIAN PRESS

JULIETTE BINOCHE hesitates and breaks into a smile when she’s asked how she enjoys dancing in the production of IN-I, which just opened in Montreal.

“I don’t know if I can call it dance but I can definitely call it exploration through movement,” she said during a news conference.

IN-I, the modern dance story of how two lovers discover each other, is a step outside usual comfort zones for Ms. Binoche and her co creator, renowned British choreographer and dancer AKRAM KHAN.

JULIETTE BINOCHE, who won a SUPPORTING ACTRESS OSCAR for THE ENGLISH PATIENT in 1996, doesn’t usually dance. IN-I, which premiered in London last year, is the first time she’s done it on stage. AKRAM KHAN doesn’t normally act but branches out in theatre for this production.

Despite what she says, it certainly looks like dance as the duo fling themselves energetically around the stage. The show runs until JANUARY 17.

JULIETTE BINOCHE, who has appeared in films like THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING and CHOCOLAT, enjoys the challenge.

“I’ve been working on the emotional world and I was interested to expand it into movement – how far would it go, how do I express some hidden part of myself through movement,” the French actor remarked.

“I’m not a trained dancer and so there was no way I could recuperate 20 years of missing dance,” she noted, so the pair had to find a way to work with their “common passion for art” and develop a way to communicate on stage.

“Akram had to let go of some of his tools as a choreographer and dancer.”

JULIETTE said she knew about some dance exercises but little about how dancers move in a set space, a challenge she acknowledged was daunting when she thought about sharing a stage with a dancer of AKRAM KHAN’S calibre, whom she described as “amazing.”

“The only way I could carry on was trust and faith and hard work too because otherwise it doesn’t work.”

Months of training followed as she and Khan found a common language – “this bridge between us. I have to say it’s been so enlightening, so frightening. It got me into mountains of anger, frustration, love, need – everything you can go through.”

AKRAM KHAN noted that some dancers train for decades to achieve an expertise in a certain form. He said, for him, the form is merely the beginning stage while he is most interested in by the emotion underneath.

“When Juliette is dancing, it’s very much a human being who is performing. She has acquired so many of the skills over the period of rehearsal and creation. There is form there. But there’s something beneath that and that is the emotional content, the human content.”

Besides the stage production, there will also be an exhibit of paintings by JULIETTE and a retrospective of her films.

Ms. Binoche, whose father was a sculptor, says she started painting as a child, copying pictures from books brought home by her mother. She gave it up for a while because she became too busy with acting.

She does self portraits. But she doesn’t dwell on her own dark mysterious gorgeousness when she’s perfecting them.

“I don’t see myself. It’s not about seeing myself. It’s about what comes through myself…I don’t know how I’m going to look. It’s just the sensation of going back to the memory of the sensation and what comes out of it.”

“I’m the first one to be astonished.”