It is with much excitement that we anticipate the launch of our Citadel LIVE 26 27 season with the return of Louis Laberge-Côté’s The Art of Degeneration. A work that is fundamentally about performance itself, come watch as Louis plays with layers of illusion, delusion, and manipulation to navigate a landscape of stage fantasies and nightmares.
We had a chance to speak with choreographer and performer Louis Laberge-Côté to dive deeper into the creation, inspiration, and artistic philosophy behind his work.
The Art of Degeneration returns to The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance September 9-12, 2026.
How has your relationship with this specific work shifted over the last decade?
In 2018, I began closing the door on my performance career as I transitioned to a new path focused mainly on teaching, mentoring, and research. While I knew I would perform again, I thought of this piece as my symbolic goodbye to the stage, since the core of my career and artistic path was moving into this next chapter.
Then the years passed, and my relationship to movement, my body, and performance changed significantly, which in turn reshaped my relationship to this work. Now, the piece’s questions about aging, retirement, and injuries have stopped being hypothetical and have become lived.
My physical vulnerabilities are now more pronounced — and that turned out to be freeing. By letting go of the idea of being athletic and focusing on being true to where I am now, I’m more at ease with playing with the unknown, feeling unpolished, or even unflattering onstage. In a way, I think that’s closer to what the piece always wanted to be.
You examine the public downfalls of figures like Elvis Presley, Chet Baker, and Marie Antoinette. What drew you specifically to these three? What do they share that helps you tell your own story?
The three you mention are part of a longer list of icons who inhabit the world of the work — among them Marilyn Monroe, Vaslav Nijinsky, Michael Jackson, Maria Callas, Liberace, and Glenn Gould. What unites them — not only the three named — is the public nature of their struggles with their demons. Each reached the top. Most overindulged. Most had severe self-destructive tendencies. Most came apart in view of an audience, in one way or another: body and image deteriorating simultaneously, in front of the world. That’s the piece in a nutshell, really: decline as entertainment.
Together, they became portals through which I can confront my own fears — losing to your inner demons, self-sabotaging or destroying yourself, becoming irrelevant, and feeling manipulated, used, abandoned, or misunderstood.
You explore the “aging body’s aesthetic potential.” How does performing a piece about decay feel as your own body changes?
There’s an uncomfortable symmetry to it. I’ve been managing injuries for years — the body genuinely restricts me — and then I step onstage to perform a piece about the body falling apart. Fiction and reality, side by side. It’s exposing. It’s also precisely why I wanted another go at this point. I can still meet the demands of the work, and yet I’ve had to build restraint and kindness into the process (neither comes naturally). What matters most in this work? What do I need to do to support it while letting go of the unnecessary? The aging body’s aesthetic potential isn’t a theme anymore. It’s the material.
The piece is dedicated to late collaborators like Phil Strong, Tedd Robinson, and Dan Wild. How is their presence felt in this remount?
All three were part of the work’s journey, each at a different stage, and each left a distinct imprint. Tedd was my mentor from 2013 to 2015, guiding the research that led to the piece, so, in a real sense, the work starts with him; his questions are woven into its foundations. Dan served as an outside eye in the early creative process, from about 2014 to 2016, helping shape the material while it was still raw and unformed. And Phil built the sound score in 2018 — I step inside his world every time I come back to this piece; the work literally lives in what he made.
All three passed between 2020 and 2022, after the original run. And here I am performing a piece that is partly about death and what survives the artist, and some of the artists who helped create it are now gone. So the remount carries something the premiere never had, creating another “fiction meets reality” dimension and making the work resonate on a more authentic and vulnerable level.
Having finally brought this “remount” to the stage, does it feel like a conclusion to this chapter of your inquiry, or has it opened the door for a new direction in your practice?
In one sense, the September run feels like a conclusion. Given my current professional path and my ever-increasing physical limitations, I doubt I will perform in a major dance work like this one again — however, I remain open to performing in limited ways. I don’t say that with grief; it’s more like clarity. I get to close the performing chapter on my own terms, with the work I made to say goodbye to the stage — another “fiction meets reality” dimension, as the piece that symbolically said goodbye now really does.
But the artistic journey certainly doesn’t end here. This project has been a thirteen-year transformation — from the earliest explorations to the 2018 premiere and now this remount — and everything it taught me continues to flow into my teaching, my creative practice, my collaborations. In this way, it opens many new directions I can’t fully map yet, and that’s part of the excitement. I look forward to seeing what it shapes next.