THE NAKED TRUTH
In Amour, Acide et Noix, Canadian choreographer Daniel Léveillé presents a stark and unflinching meditation on the human form—one that reduces dance to its most essential components. Staged on a bare black floor under austere white lighting, the 60-minute modern dance work is minimalist in both visual and choreographic design. Gone are the trappings of costume and set. Instead, Léveillé offers the body itself—naked, vulnerable, and unapologetically exposed—as the primary site of meaning. “Is not the skin the one true body costume?” he asks in the program at NYU Skirball. His answer is clear: nudity is not provocation, but a tool for honesty.
Four dancers—Lou Amsellem, Jimmy Gonzalez, Marco Arzenton, and Marco Curci—move with classical training and precision, executing flawlessly the unrelenting physicality. They are young, lithe, and strong; their bodies bearing the brunt of Léveillé’s physically demanding score: relentless jumping, stomping, lifting, and running. Their endurance is impressive—their control, remarkable. At times, their exertion feels less like choreography and more like ritual, a series of stark physical incantations laid bare for scrutiny.
Premiering in Montréal in 2001, this remounting of Amour, Acide et Noix (which plays again tomorrow) carries with it an aesthetic that feels even older—one that harks back to the postmodern investigations of the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Like the Judson pioneers, Léveillé deconstructs the very idea of what dance can be, stripping away theatricality in favor of raw, elemental gesture. But here, nudity becomes the differentiating agent, a visual declaration of frankness that refuses metaphor or costume.
The choreographic vocabulary is intentionally sparse and repetitive: jump, pause, walk-walk-walk, pause. Drop to all fours. Collapse. Arabesque. Run-run-run, pause. Each sequence is delivered with a neutral expression and a forward gaze, as if to erase narrative in favor of presence. This minimalist language—deliberate in its monotony—rarely interacts with the music, creating a dissonance between sound and movement that occasionally teeters on tedium. Yet within this framework, there are moments of transcendent beauty: a delicate lift between two men, the elegant swoop of a body into another’s arms, the soft echo of contact that suggests intimacy without sentiment. There are also moments of surprising comedy.
Musically, the piece drifts between the baroque elegance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a head-banging punk interlude, soft rock whispers, a quirky bird-call tutorial, and silence. Yet the choreography remains indifferent to these shifts. The music seems to wash over the dancers rather than guide them, creating a curious detachment between ear and eye.
Marc Parent’s lighting design adheres to the work’s minimalist ethos: three rows of white lights hang upstage, with side light or golden pools that isolate the dancers in almost painterly relief. The lighting itself feels choreographed, with an achingly slow fade-in and fade-out that bookends the evening in a quiet meditation on time.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the performers’ nudity, the stage remains curiously asexual. There is no erotic charge, no flirtation with desire. Instead, the bodies appear clinical, almost abstract. The dancers rarely make eye contact or acknowledge each other beyond the mechanics of partnering. A hand on a shoulder becomes a cue, not a caress. There is a cool affection, but little emotional exchange.
And yet, the audience was rapt. Whether drawn by the audacity of the nudity, the rigor of the choreography, or the strange and hypnotic repetition of the movement, they did not look away. Léveillé’s work may resist easy interpretation, but it commands attention. Amour, Acide et Noix is not an easy evening of dance—it’s a philosophical exercise, and, for some, perhaps a kind of poetry.
photos by Julie Artacho
Amour, Acide et Noix
Daniel Léveillé Dance
NYU Skirball, 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square
60 minutes, no intermission
ends on April 12, 2025
for tickets, call 212.998.4941 or visit NYU Skirball
Gregory Fletcher is an author, a theater professor, a playwright, director, and stage manager. His craft book on playwriting is entitled Shorts and Briefs. Other publishing credits include two YA novels (Other People’s Crazy, and Other People’s Drama), 2 novellas in the series Inclusive Bedtime Stories (Tom and Huck Sitting in a Tree, and The Never Land Hoax), 2 short stories in The Night Bazaar series, and several essays. Website, Facebook, Instagram.
