The DanceHouse 2026/27 season begins October 23 & 24 with ODE, a new contemporary dance work from Montreal’s Compagnie Catherine Gaudet, on the Vancouver Playhouse stage.
Part pop-rock concert, part ritualistic ceremony, ODE is choreographed by the company’s Artistic Director, Catherine Gaudet, who last presented Les jolies chose (The Pretty Things), with DanceHouse in 2024. The hour-long work, channels the industrial happiness complex into a stripped-down exhortation on group-think conformity and cultural collapse, ultimately revealing a fragile blade of hope under the burden of collective pretense.
“ODE begins with something wonderfully simple—a group of people coming together around the idea of love—and gradually transforms into something exhilarating, strange, and unsettling,” says Jim Smith, Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse. “Eleven performers move and chant with extraordinary precision and endurance, and I found myself transported somewhere between a dance work, a rock concert, and a ritual. What stays with me long after is the tension between the desire to belong and the cost of surrendering yourself to the group.”
Winner of the 2022 Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal, Catherine Gaudet has established a reputation as a choreographer with a strong, distinctive style, drawing on themes of psyche, identity, and the body. With razor-sharp commentary on social conventions, Gaudet uses micro-movements and rhythmic expressions to reveal emotions and sensations we try to hide.
ODE premiered to a sold-out crowd at the 2024 edition of Montréal’s Festival TransAmériques (FTA), and comes to Vancouver following its Western Canadian debut in Calgary on October 21, 2026.
DanceHouse’s presentation of ODE is on stage at 8pm, October 23 & 24, 2026, at Vancouver Playhouse 600 Hamilton Street. The production will feature a pre-show talk at 7:15pm each evening, as well as a post-show Reception in the Salon, following Friday’s performance. Visit dancehouse.ca for presentation and production details and tickets.