by Patricia Leigh Beaman
Published March 24, 2025
Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière’s appointment as Lucy Graham Dance Director at BEMF marks a bold new era for historical dance
Committed to educating the public about Baroque dance, Lacoursière creates productions that are rigorously researched and brim with humanity and physical comedy
The Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) has announced the appointment of Montréal resident Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière as Lucy Graham Dance Director. The biennial festival’s 2025 edition is scheduled for June 8 – 15.
“Marie-Nathalie has been an invaluable collaborator for many years and is at the top of her field,” says the festival’s executive director, Kathleen Fay. “Her leadership will enable BEMF to continue expanding the work of our dance company, shape all BEMF initiatives involving dance, introduce young dancers to the beauty and elegance of Baroque dance, and assure that the highest caliber of Baroque dance will continue to delight BEMF audiences for years to come.”
The prestigious position, formerly held by Melinda Sullivan (from 2017 until her retirement in 2023), was created in honor of Lucy Graham (1953-2016), a venerated choreographer long associated with the festival. Lacoursière herself is no stranger at BEMF: She first performed Graham’s choreography in Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Psyche, in 2007, and has collaborated with festival Opera Director Gilbert Blin as a choreographer for several productions as well as at Opéra Nice in France.
As BEMF dance director, Lacoursière will deepen her involvement by contributing her extensive expertise as a musician, director, dramaturge, and Baroque dancer to the creative team of Blin, as well as its artistic directors, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, and its orchestra director, Robert Mealy.
Lacoursière says her mission will be to continue training young dance artists and introducing them to the dynamic and nuanced process of recreating Baroque repertoire. “I want to have more dancers in the troupe, and increase the number of younger dancers so we develop a bigger pool for the future.”
Known for her bold re-imaginings of Baroque dance productions, the award-winning Lacoursière has staged and choreographed over 40 operas in Canada and beyond, and enjoyed numerous creative collaborations with Canadian early-music groups such as the Toronto Masque Theater, Les Boréades de Montréal, Clavecin en Concert, and the Montreal Baroque Festival. She founded Les Jardins Chorégraphiques in Montréal in 2007, which serves not only as a creative performance endeavor, but also as an educational platform for teaching the fundamentals of Baroque dance to the public.
Lacoursière received her Baroque training from historical dance experts lauded for their teaching, choreography, and scholarship: Wendy Hilton (1931-2002), a British scholar who taught at Juilliard for years, and French choreographers Marie-Geneviève Massé and François Denieau (1946-2015), who studied closely with French scholar and choreographer Francine Lancelot (1929-2003). Lacoursière gratefully acknowledges the in-depth education she received in terms of technique, style, research, and the reading of Feuillet-Beauchamp notation — a 17th century system for recording Baroque dances, commissioned by Louis XIV.
The appointment of Lacoursière will no doubt bring fresh winds to the stage of BEMF. With a wide-ranging background in jazz, contemporary, ballet, tap, commedia dell’arte, acting, voice, and music, it is interesting to consider how this multidisciplinary artist will persevere in her vision of educating audiences while pushing the parameters of Baroque ballet. Inherent in this jewel-like form of court dance (ballet de cour), with its origins stretching back to 17th-century France, the movements of a Baroque dancer are understated, delicate, and replete with detail and specificity: a rotation of the lower leg, a turn of the hand, or a curve of the arm are all executed in a much subtler manner than you would expect to see in a 19th-century Classical ballet, such as Swan Lake.
Because of the lack of high leg extensions, pyrotechnical virtuosity, and extreme turn-out of the legs that audiences often expect in ballet dancers today, Baroque technique may be perceived as being less difficult; however, the precision and accuracy that underlies all solid dance technique categorically exists in this form as well. Classical ballet dancers who dare to assay the advanced theatrical dances of the Baroque repertory are often stymied and humbled by their complexity.
A related misconception is that Baroque dance is merely a stepping-stone to Classical ballet. Yet Baroque ballets are worthy of closer scrutiny: couched behind the beauty of aristocratic dance in these opulent ballets de cour were potent political messages, spun into metaphorical narratives, which reified France’s colonialist and geopolitical power, and glorified the monarch. In the 17th-century courts of Bourbon kings, courtiers maintained a high level of dance training, and the king himself often took starring roles in ballets that mirrored the politics and expanding world view of the time.
In Baroque spectacles, grace, equilibrium, and a noble carriage of the body existed in tandem with physical comedy, bawdiness, and irreverent cheekiness, due to the influences of folk dance and Italian commedia dell’arte, a form of raucous physical comedy popular in France since the Renaissance. Whether one played a noble or ignoble character, the dancer onstage conveyed to the audience a great deal about politics, power, and ultimately, the human condition. Lacoursière’s ongoing commitment to educating the public about Baroque dance runs in tandem with offering productions that are rigorously researched, but that also brim with humanity and physical comedy.
‘The rhythmic connection is everything’
In addition to audience edification, the process of training the next generation of Baroque dancers is of genuine concern to top artists in the field, such as Catherine Turocy. An acclaimed choreographer, performer, and stage director, she is artistic director of the New York Baroque Dance Company, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2026. Turocy welcomes Lacoursière appointment, and hopes she will be well-supported by BEMF in training future Baroque dancers.
“As the Director of BEMF Dance Company I hope Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière will be training her dancers throughout the year and not just the three to four weeks of rehearsal for the festival,” says Turocy. “Will it be a pick-up company, or a group of dedicated dancers working together, developing their expertise in dance theory, and practice and learning how to read dance scores? This would be a great contribution to the future of Baroque dance.”
For Caroline Copeland, a member of the BEMF Dance Company since 2001, the most valuable experiences have occurred in the studio with colleagues from Sweden, France, Canada, and England. “The rehearsal room at BEMF is a unique experience where instrumentalists, dancers, singers, and costumers work side by side, engaging in fun and creative conversations about historical practice, movement, gesture, poetry, phrasing, and meaning,” she says. “We are putting theory into practice, and BEMF offers a creative lab of sorts that gives space to these exchanges.”
She is committed to presenting authentic Baroque dance in her productions, but is also impelled to drive the form forward
Another of Lacoursière’s goals is to increase audiences by offering accessible, vibrant productions that are relevant to the here-and-now. Although she commits to presenting authentic Baroque dance in her productions, she also is impelled to drive the form forward. “We don’t know exactly what they were doing on stage back then,” she says. “We know what the steps were, but we have to imagine that was a spectacle. So now, we have to make it be a spectacle for the public today. I am not going to play electric guitar, but there is a door that can be opened — I am always trying to go as far as I can in order to connect the music with the dance on stage, such as how can we make the rhythms read in the arms? For me, the rhythmic connection is everything.”
Indeed, in watching Lacoursière’s carriage of her arms and in her footwork, we witness insouciant flashes of hip-hop, the earthiness of folk dance, or the sensualness of jazzy shoulder-rolls in her choreography. Due to her diverse performance training, she is anything but shy about interpolating commedia dell’arte or popular dance vernacular into her robust Baroque choreography. Even Francine Lancelot — the grande dame of Baroque dance scholarship — once mused, “How to bring Belle [Baroque] Dance out of the ivory tower where very few ever come to visit?” While honoring the cultural specificity of the Baroque form, Lacoursière is not reluctant about pulling it out of its ivory tower, and catapulting it into the present. It will no doubt be a compelling journey for both aficionados and the uninitiated to witness.
Patricia Leigh Beaman is University Professor of Dance at Wesleyan University. As a longtime member of the New York Baroque Dance Company, she toured the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, performing in numerous opera-ballets, and as a guest artist with numerous early-music ensembles. She has also performed, choreographed, and taught contemporary dance in the U.S. and Europe.
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