Dulcinea

About Dulcinea

Early years

Dulcinea started dancing when she was 4 with “Miss Ronnie”, who taught her Martha Graham Technique. At 13, she studied with Paul Sanasardo, who didn’t like her habit of looking through the window at people walking down 6th ave during her barre exercises. He issued her an ultimatum: “You must choose between the window and the studio. If you want to dance in my company, you must stay focused inside the studio for the next ten years!” Unwilling to give up observing humanity’s dance, she chose the window and stopped dancing for several years.

At 17, she traveled to Europe for the first time, and discovered a small pantomime theater in Tivoli Garden, in Copenhagen. The stage was empty. She imagined mime – which she knew nothing about – as an art form that combined dance and theater, and decides that it was what she wanted to do.

Her parents insisted on her going to University. She chose Friend’s World College, a Quaker* “University without walls”, where she was able to create her own curriculum, on the condition that her studies have the aim of improving the world. She adopts this philosophy, at first in order to please her parents… but she firmly believes in it to this day.

(*) The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) started in England 350 years ago. The Friends believe a part of God exists in each human being, and they advocate respecting human rights, worldwide justice, economic equality and peace.

She spent a year in London, at the Ovalhouse, a theater and youth club, where she worked alongside marginalised young artists… a few of whom would become stars, like John Ratzenberger (Cheers) and Pierce Brosnan (Bond). She takes mime classes given by Iris Walton, a student of Étienne Decroux, who encourages her to go work with the mime master (who is already 84).

In 1975,

she goes to Paris to study with Étienne Decroux. She does classical ballet 6 classes a week. She mimes and sings on the street to pay her studies and she creates flip books (with small notebooks stolen from Monoprix). When she needed an evaluation from an expert on her domaine to obtain her university degree, she does a (catastrophic) audition for Jacques Tati, who tells her to please come see him again when she has something good to show. She succeeds in getting her degree anyway.

When Decroux’s assistants, Jean Asselin and Denise Boulanger, return to Montreal to establish their company, they invite Dulcinea to join la Troupe Omnibus.

She moves to Montreal in 1978.

In Paul Buissonneau‘s warehouse, where Omnibus rehearses, Dulcinea discovers a hoop, whose diameter is exactly her hight. She starts working with this object that would become her talisman. She leaves Omnibus in 1982, and Paul gives her the hoop which will follow her everywhere until 1993.