“This is a story about childhood. It’s in at least two languages, some spoken, some not . . . We’ll remember . . . falling off your bicycle, stealing money off your mother’s dressing table . . . .”

A man sits with a book on his lap stage left as two dancers enter the space, then put on harlequin costumes and proceed to (artfully) cavort like children at play. Seen on one’s computer screen, this is Les Paradis Perdus / Remix, a delightfully layered online presentation, featuring commentary from the four participants.

Laurence Lemieux created the duet in 2005 for herself and Bill Coleman, commissioning Christopher Butterfield to compose music based on childhood memories Lemieux submitted to him. Had the COVID-19 pandemic not arrived, Jimmy and Juliette Coleman, the couple’s very able dancers, were to perform Les Paradis Perdus at the Citadel on May 14.

Swallowing her disappointment at the theatrical shutdown, Lemieux, artistic director of Citadel + Compagnie, has mounted a 10-week online performance series that began on April 28. Every Tuesday at 2 pm EDT until June 30, a new work is released on www.citadelcie.com. The series so far has included work by Naishi Wang and Sabina Perry.

Les Paradis Perdus / Remix went up May 12, introduced with a cyber conversation among Lemieux, Butterfield and Luke Garwood and Erin Poole, the dancers who performed Les Paradis in 2015.

When what performers need most – bodies in seats watching them – is not available, what can one do to bring an element of spontaneity to a production? What the CetC team wanted most to avoid was presenting a relic of a show; hence the remix, a newly edited version of the recording.

On a shared screen we see Lemieux’s handwritten notes for Butterfield’s score. The composer tells us he removed certain syllables to create his score. In the recording we can see and hear him, intoning lines like a choir singer or standing with a furled roll of paper to speak as if through a megaphone.

Meanwhile, Garwood and Poole, entering in street clothes, appear to regress as they don their joker/harlequin costumes, reproducing the spirit of childhood and adolescence in Lemieux’s inventive choreography.

On the Zoom screen, Poole reflects on how an audience might adapt to the reality of lockdown entertainment. “I wonder if one might watch (at home) from under the covers,” she says, remembering another childhood transgression: reading stories with a flashlight after lights-out.

Next up on the Citadel + Compagnie online series: unmoored by Peggy Baker and Sarah Chase (May 19) and Malcolm by James Kudelka (May 26)

Watch here: https://www.citadelcie.com/les-paradis-perdus-remix-citadel-online/

Photo of Erin Poole and Luke Garwood by Jeremy Mimnagh