DanceHouse opens its 2025-2026 season with a presentation of Daniel Léveillé’s masterwork, Amour, acide et noix (Love, Acid and Nuts), at the Vancouver Playhouse October 24 and 25.
A raw, full-length piece, Amour, acide et noix (Love, Acid and Nuts), features four dancers performing fully nude, who use the mechanics of their arms, legs, torsos, and skulls to plumb the very nature of the human condition.
“Amour, acide et noix is a landmark in dance–an unflinching, minimalist masterpiece that confronts beauty, vulnerability, and the human body with rare honesty,” says Jim Smith, Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse. “For DanceHouse audiences, it offers a vital encounter with a work that transformed Montréal’s dance scene upon its premiere in 2001, and continues to resonate globally more than 20 years later.”
Set against Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, pop music, and birdsong, the quartet move through a series of solos, duets, and ensemble work throughout the episodic piece. As the work unfolds, the nudity becomes irrelevant as the work reveals universal truths that lie beneath the surface: our often conflicting desires for connection and solitude, for grounding and escape, and for fragile vulnerability amidst the heaviness of life
Free of any costumes or pretense, the work “is as disturbing as it is compelling. Léveillé isn’t just showing passive spectators a world of naked people; he forces [the audience] into the participatory act of confronting our taboos and desires” (The Village Voice). The shared language and mystery of the body allows the dancers to evoke humanity as a whole, and the commonality of the physical is reborn in all its delicacy and resolve.
Daniel Léveillé is a renowned Montréal choreographer, dance teacher, and artistic director of his eponymous dance company for 27 years. The choreographer was honoured with the prestigious Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal in 2017 for his influence on Canadian contemporary dance. Léveillé has created more than 30 works as an independent choreographer, over his acclaimed 40-year career. In 2013, his work, Solitudes Solo, was recognized as the best choreographic work by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Léveillé creates choreographies that reach the borders of the impossible, that help to reveal the beauty of the human being in all his imperfections and he chooses nudity as the only possible costume in order to avoid any possible dissimulation.
DanceHouse’s presentation of Amour, acide et noix (Love, Acid and Nuts) runs October 24 & 25, 2025 at Vancouver Playhouse, 600 Hamilton Street. Performances will also feature a pre-show talk at 7:15pm each evening, there will also be a post-show reception following Friday’s performance in the Salon. Visit dancehouse.ca for more information and tickets.