Chouinard made ‘choreography for the fingers’
Gymnopédies performers learned to play the piano music they dance to
Montreal choreographer Marie Chouinard has called on her dancers to do some pretty outrageous things over the past 20 years, but even the veterans of her company were left openmouthed by her demand during the creation of Gymnopédies.
This new half-hour work, along with Henri Michaux: Mouvements from 2011, forms a double bill whose Montreal première takes place next week. Gymnopédies uses the three short piano pieces of the same title by Erik Satie, including the wellknown Gymnopédies No. 1, which has long served in popular culture as a languorous, meditative mantra.
Were the dancers stunned because of some demand to go into sexually taboo areas where Chouinard has roamed in the past? Not at all. Despite some brief nudity, Gymnopédies is rather chaste. What shocked them was Chouinard’s announcement that they would not be performing to a piano recording.
“I told them, ‘You are going to play it yourselves,’ ” she said with typical exuberance recently in her sunny, spotlessly white office on the second floor of Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s elegantly designed studios on MontRoyal Ave.
Unfortunately, none of the dancers knew how to play the piano. The notion of having to play a well-known piano piece on stage in public was daunting. To Chouinard’s mind, playing the piano initially seemed like learning “choreography for the fingers.”
“But it was so difficult, a lot more difficult than I thought it would be when I had the idea.”
A piano teacher was hired to show each dancer how to play one of the three Gymnopédies. After the first few classes, the dancers were despairing.
“The teacher told them if they practised 15 minutes a day, they’d succeed. We made up a practice timetable that the dancers had to sign.”
After about nine months, Chouinard said, the dancers’ playing started to sound okay. After a year, “it sounded pretty good.”
During the piece, each dancer takes a turn playing one of the Gymnopédies on a piano on stage. According to Chouinard, the dancers dealt well with their piano playing at the world première in Lisbon last June. Since then, the piece has undergone structural changes. Indeed, it was only after performances in Pittsburgh last month that Chouinard felt the piece was finished and she could put it behind her. (Not someone who can remain idle for long, Chouinard starts work on a new creation in January.)
This month, the dancers began learning one of the other Gymnopédies so that they could replace each other in case someone was injured or fell ill. Eventually, the dancers will know how to play all three pieces.
“They don’t know how to play the piano, but they can play Gymnopédies,” smiled Chouinard.
The other work on the bill, Henri Michaux: Mouvements, created in 2011, drew its inspiration from the Belgianborn artist and writer Henri Michaux. Many years ago, a friend presented Chouinard with a 1951 first-edition copy of Mouvements, a book with 64 pages of Michaux’s black-ink-on-paper abstract drawings, along with a long poem and afterword.
“Twenty years later I looked at it and realized that the drawings were a choreographic representation. I always knew that it contained something particular, but didn’t realize it was notation.”
Michaux’s spontaneously created drawings — f rom two to 16 figures on a page — do indeed often suggest human forms. Recreating their shapes on dancers’ bodies was, said Chouinard, “quite fun to do.”
Funtowatch, too, at a recent rehearsal as the dancers advanced one by one or in pairs in front of a screen showing individual drawings. It was remarkable how skilfully the dancers contorted their limbs to look like the projected images behind them, especially when pairs of dancers formed a joint image. (Dancers refer to their awareness of how to position their limbs as proprioception).
At one point, veteran company member Carol Prieur diverged from the sequence and began reciting the book’s poem. Its full-length version, in a translation by Bernard Bador and Clayton Eshleman, has passages that seem to describe the fascinating force of the ink drawings:
Movements of quartering and of inner exasperation more than the movements of walking movements of explosions, of refusal, of stretching every which way.
Ironically, Michaux had turned to making ink drawings to express feelings that he thought words could not convey. A few years earlier, his wife had died tragically as a result of a fire accident, and he was still mourning her. When in later years he published a kind of autobiography in the third person, he described his loss in laconic, almost banal terms: “February, 1948. Death of his wife following terrible burns.”
Dance might seem naturally to complement Michaux’s drawings, but Michaux, who died in 1984, might well have objected. Presumably, he appreciated the irony of the title, Mouvements, applied to drawings that remain immobile. The “movement” in Michaux’s drawings comes from the way in which they seem to emerge from a white void like newborn phantoms, and in the way in which the many shapes relate to each other on the page.
Although in the widest sense Chouinard was imitating the visual imagination of another artist, her choreography for Mouvement had unmistakable touches of her signature style — dancers hissing and grimacing and preening like untamed animals.
In November, Compagnie Marie Chouinard will present the same bill at the Joyce Theater in New York, its first visit to that world capital of dance in a few years. For the rest of the year, the troupe tours Europe.
Compagnie Marie