Always an artist

Dancer, musician and occasional actress
Clara Furey turns her attention from
movement to melody with a showcase at
Festival Voix d’Amériques

LIVE ART LOVER: Furey

by VINCENT TINGUELY

In performance, musician and dancer Clara Furey comes across as saturnine, intense and passionate. Her songs seem to arise from a deep wellspring of the collective unconscious, the piano and voice combining to deliver images of Orphic intensity. In person, she’s petite, friendly, straightforward and intimate in conversation. The daughter of singer, actress and director Carole Laure and musician Lewis Furey—whose musical and film collaborations of the late-’70s eventually led to marriage and prominent careers both at home and abroad—never had to think twice about being an artist.

“People sometimes tell me, ‘What would you have done? Did you do it to follow your parents?’ I mean, I don’t even know,” says Furey. “I was never looking up to my parents as artists. They were good that way, they were not being ‘the artists’ in front of the kids, they were Mom and Dad. At the same time, it was like, I was four years old and I was the artist! [laughs] Our right to be called that name was ingrained in us from birth.”

She started out studying piano as a child, and did a stint of higher studies in classical piano at the Conservatoire Municipal de Paris. She turned to songwriting as a teenager. “Really, music was my thing, very much so, everything came from a musical point of view at the beginning,” says Furey. “And music actually ended up getting me into dance. I was drawn to Egyptian music, and then I started bellydancing because I loved that music so much.”

When she moved to Montreal to study at the Ateliers de danse moderne de Montréal, she didn’t consider it a career move. “It was just a good program to be in,” says Furey. “I finished school and I suddenly got jobs in dance, and I started working with the right people, I guess. Dance is what I earn my living with, it’s my main job, and I kind of let the music go for a good five, six years while I was doing that. I’ve worked for George Stamos quite a bit. That’s the next show I’m doing, actually, right after the Voix d’Amériques we’re doing his show, Reservoir-Pneumatic at l’Agora de Danse.”

FROM STAGE TO SCREEN

At the time she was studying dance, Furey’s mother was casting about for ideas for her second film as a director, CQ2. “She would come to my dance shows,” says Furey. “And you know, my mother’s always liked modern dance anyway, she’s always been a big fan. She said, ‘I feel like doing a movie with a lot of dancing in it. Clara, would you be interested?’ I’m like, ‘No, no, no, I’m not an actor, I certainly don’t want to be compared to you.’ This and that. I need to have creative liberty, you know? She said, ‘Well, you could help me. We could collaborate. I don’t know the new choreographers in Montreal.’ So, she got me to do her movie. I had no experience before that.”

By all accounts, Furey delivered an impressive performance, which has led to a second starring role in Guylaine Dionne’s latest feature film, Serveuses demandées. But she remains insouciant about the acting biz. “I think I had a bit of beginner’s luck with CQ2,“ Furey says. “That’s what I felt when I saw it, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad...’ It was also written for me, so that helped a lot. But really, I never went to acting auditions, I never did a workshop. I don’t really want to talk of myself as an actress at all. In general, I like live art.”

Audiences can get a taste of Furey’s live art at Body and Soul, one of the flagship shows of this year’s Festival Voix d’Amériques. It features a line-up of adventurous dancers who’ll be exploring the textual nuances of their craft, including Montrealers Catherine Tardif and Marie-Hélène Bellavance, and the French Schmutt Sisters (twins Séverine and Élodie Lombardo). Furey will perform poetry accompanied by the music of Francis La Haye, an electro track recorded by her brother Thomas Furey, and a duet with her friend Torus. She’ll also be performing several of her songs on the piano.

“What I want in the next year is to do an album,” Furey explains. “People ask me, ‘How can I hear your stuff?’ I’m really starting, I put four of my songs on my MySpace page for the first time. More than that, I want to do shows. To do shows I need a public, so it’s a great event, Body and Soul, for me to do my music.”

BODY AND SOUL AT FESTIVAL VOIX
D’AMÉRIQUES AT LA SALA ROSSA
(4848 ST-LAURENT) ON WEDNESDAY,
FEB. 11, 8:30 P.M.