DEMERDRY Collective

Nanne Springer

DEMERDRY was born the day Harry Demers and Ève Landry decided to join their respective living arts practices – one through dance and body work, the other through words and theater with the pretense of being able, as a collective, to focus their creative effervescence. Since 2024, the duo has been engaged in an aesthetic and performative exploration of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder often shortened to ADHD. Inseparable from our general relationship to attention, technology plays an increasingly central role in their research.

Their ever-mutable project cascades between audience-meeting opportunities and intensive periods of creation, at the pace of the support it finds. DEMERDRY’s core creative duo is in turn visited by collaborators, audiences and mentors; on stage, questions multiply, answers unfold, and chaos is transmuted.

Ève Website Instagram
Harry Website Instagram

TDAH (working title)

In a pseudo-documentary approach, Harry and their experience of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) become the subject of the project’s inquiry. How can we stage a different way of experiencing the world? Stimuli? The elasticity of time? Or that strange feeling of losing oneself in a space-time where hunger no longer exists because the object of our attention has completely taken hold of us?

Their research unfolds through a maximalist, at once mesmerizing and breathless aesthetic built in layers, as the obsessions of the day accumulate alongside those of yesterday. The project draws on a tentacular, ever-evolving writing practice and a DIY ethos. Programming errors, glitches, and onstage accidents become raw material. Through overlapping soundscapes, video projections, textiles, movement, and magical effects, the show builds a teeming landscape where obsession and ingenuity meet sensory sensitivities and hyperactivity.

©Nanne Springer

CREDITS

Team

A creation by the collective DEMERDRY

Creation, performance, movement, and technical direction
Harry Demers

Creation, performance, text, and production management
Ève Landry

Lighting design
Louis Martz

Dramaturgical support
Marie-Ève Groulx