Marie-Andrée Gougeon became active in the dance community in the early 1980s, after training at the Pointépiénu dance school and in the main dance institutions of the time, where she met the creators and dancers who gradually built the future of our dance, especially in Montreal, but also in Toronto and New York.
Along the way, she worked with many dance artists, such as Daniel Léveillé, Paul-André Fortier, Catherine Tardif, Ginette Laurin, Jean-Pierre Perrault, Linda Rabin, James Kudelka, and Françoise Sullivan. This is followed by several other stimulating encounters with a new generation of choreographers and performers who play a leading role in the development of the discipline in Montreal, including Sylvain Émard, Danièle Desnoyers, Lynda Gaudreau, Benoît Lachambre, José Navas, Martin Bélanger, Manon Levac, Ken Roy, Anne Lebeau, and Sophie Corriveau. At the same time, she was invited to conduct training classes at the UQAM’s dance department.
Present on stage until 2001, she then reoriented her career to take up the positions of artistic assistant, playwright and rehearsal manager, especially in Berlin, with the German choreographer Sasha Waltz for the creation of Körper (2000), presented at the prestigious Schaübuhne am Lehniner Platz. Back in Montreal, she became assistant to the artistic director of the Jean-Pierre Perrault Foundation. Simultaneously, she has a professional relationship with choreographer Daniel Léveillé who invites her to take an active part in the company Daniel Léveillé nouvelle danse, in the aftermath of the creation of Utopie (1997) and Amour, acide et noix (2001). She then began to learn how to manage artistic projects and, with Daniel Léveillé, devised a support model that encouraged the national and international influence of the works of visionary creators. This model, which involves the entire DLD team, contributed to the development of 13 different creators and ensured the distribution of 43 works in 157 cities around the world. In this process, Georges Skalkogiannis, artists’ agents, and her friend and confidant Claude Béland, visual artist, were major accomplices.