A Cloud in My Tummy offers a spellbinding plunge into the tumult of human emotions, encouraging spectators to let themselves be carried away by the performance.

Identifying and understanding emotions plays a crucial role in social, emotional, and cognitive development. As a dance teacher in schools, Hélène Langevin integrates emotional education into the heart of her work with children. Building on this background and her other experiences mixing movement and feeling, she sought to expand her choreographic and theatrical explorations of emotions with her next work—an invitation she extended to choreographer and hypnotherapist Audrey Bergeron, leading to their second collaboration.

Bergeron eagerly took up the challenge, meeting with children aged four to nine to better understand how young people express their emotions. That’s how she met Margot, a young girl whose sensitivity and unique imagination touched her deeply. Margot’s account quickly became a narrative throughline for the show. Her presence echoes the young audience’s own emotions back to them, strengthening the show’s impact and theme. This immersive format fosters a deeper connection with the emotional palette of the performance, yielding a captivating and deeply personal experience.

A similarly immersive method also formed the basis of the choreography. Drawing on her background as a hypnosis practitioner, Audrey Bergeron guided each dancer through reliving an emotionally charged memory in the studio, encouraging them to let the movement emerge from the feelings and sensations their memory aroused. The result is an embodied language imbued with the deeply personal.

By combining their strengths and making the most of their differences, the two choreographers have created a work that leaves no stone unturned. Their creative duality enriches the show, resulting in highly imaginative scenes.

What was their inspiration for the title? “We wanted a metaphor that would encompass the emotional range of little ones. A cloud can evoke so much: everything from a harbinger of a coming storm to the image of a big, fluffy pillow,” explains Bergeron.

Like clouds, dance is wordless but charged with emotion as well as a portal to poetry and the abstract. Every child is free to interpret the show as they see fit, giving free rein to their imagination and letting their own inner cloud inspire a story.