Bitef

Photo / Foto: Marie Chouinard Dancer / IgraSca: Carol Prieur

bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS Ballet in two acts. Created at the Venice Biennale's International Festival of Contemporary Dance, Italy, 2005 In this new work by Marie Chouinard, the company's ten dancers execute variations on the exercise of freedom. Often, the dancers appear on points: on one, two, and even four at a time. In a spectroscopy of the gesture, we also see them using different devices - crutches, rope, prostheses, horizontal bars, and harnesses - which at times liberate their movements, at others fetter it, and at still others create it. This use of accessories gives rise to unusual bodily shapes and gestural dynamics and opens onto a universe of meticulous and playful explorations in which solos, duos, trios and group work, in their labour, pleasure and invention, echo the human condition.An aesthete beyond norms, Marie Chouinard presents her ideas on the way the indefmableness of the Other and the flagrancy of Beauty brush up against one another through an interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations. Subtle and extravagant, sumptuous and wild, the work's movements plumb the insoluble mystery of the body, of the living being. COMPANY MARIE CHOUINARD The international reputation of Compagnie Marie Chouinard is the result of twenty-eight years of work by Montreal artist Marie Chouinard. Now a fixture on the world's major stages and festivals, the company has its roots in Chouinard's first creation in 1978, the solo Crystallization. This piece, which immediately earned her a reputation for originality, was followed by over fifty choreographic productions, action-performances, vocal works, installations and films, in which she refined her lifelong interest in formal research and the human body. From 1978 to 1990, Marie Chouinard performed alone throughout the world, developing a personal language with a universal resonances. In 1990 she formed the Compagnie Marie Chouinard. In the dozen works she has created since then, the choreographer has explored the poetics of the body in immediate, intelligible and ever-surprising ways. Each new piece is an odisey through the history of humanity, while avoiding the chronology or linearity of a narrative. In work stripped to its bare essence, a theatrical, quasi-operatic effect is achieved, the elements of "living art" brought to the fore through various techniques of composition and staging. The dancer is presented as a singular entity, a being constructed before our eyes, whose rhythmic configurations are broken down into micro-divisions, analogous to the fluctuations of verbal communication. Although her works may be perceived as provocations, they are better viewed as pathways towards freedom and compassion, where humour is possible and Eros omnipresent. The architecture of the cosmos, the inner intelligence of the body and the inexhaustible complexity of its articulations and mutations harmonize in formally accomplished constructions in which style and substance are in perfect resonance.