YOUTHFUL SENSE OF AWE
Choreographer Marie Chouinard is force of nature
Marie Chouinard once proposed that her choreography is something like the moment just after life came into existence. So it seems poetically appropriate that it all began in water for her.
“My very first strong experience with movement was with swimming,” the legendary choreographer explains while sitting in a rehearsal room of her company’s three-storey dance studio just east of Mount Royal. “I was already doing ballet at the time, but strangely enough, it was my swimming teacher who was telling me more about movement and its connection with the breath. And then there was the way the light came into the pool. … Wow!”
And she demonstrates right there on her chair the euphoria of a body moving through water, the wonder of observing light dancing on the ripples, the audible rhythm of air being expelled from and drawn into the lungs.
Anybody who has caught one of Chouinard’s stage creations would recognize that amalgamation of clean forceful movement, dramatic vocal effects and spectacular lighting as she relives those childhood muscle memories from more than half a century ago.
Chouinard has been swimming upstream ever since, from her 1978 solo debut Crystallization to her 2016 show Jérôme Bosch: Le jardin des délices (one of three pieces she’s bringing to Place des Arts next week as part of the Danse Danse series), all the way to the Venice Biennale, where she recently began a fouryear tenure as director of dance.
That latest honour comes after a Governor General Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, the Prix Denise Pelletier in 2010, a Conseil des arts de Montréal Grand Prix in 2006, a New York Bessie, an NAC prize — far too many, in fact, to list in full. Oh, and did I mention she’s a Chevalier of the Ordre des arts et des lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada?
What’s kept her going so strong over the years, Chouinard suggests, with corroborating enthusiasm, is that she has retained the childlike sense of awe she first felt in that swimming pool and, later, while taking her first steps as a dancer in public.
“I’m enjoying these years so much. It’s a big difference from 40 years ago,” she says, “but what is the same is the not knowing, and the feeling that everything is so big and immense and somehow there is a mystery that you can’t understand. This is still there. What is not the same is that now I have 10 wonderful dancers, I have this studio. Forty years ago, I had little me — I was alone. But what is different is small compared to what is the same.”
Born the first of five children in 1955 in Quebec City, Chouinard came to Montreal in the mid1970s to audition at the National Theatre School.
“I didn’t know what to do at the time,” she recalls. “I could have been a lawyer, a journalist, explorer — I don’t know what. So I thought I could become an actor. While I was waiting for an answer, I thought: ‘If I’m going to go into the school, I should get my body ready.’”
So Chouinard got more serious with her ballet lessons. As luck would have it — “great luck,” according to her — she wasn’t accepted as an actor, but by this time, the dance bug had bitten.
I didn’t know what to do at the time. I could have been a lawyer, a journalist, explorer — I don’t know what. So I thought I could become an actor.
Over the next few years and with a series of solo pieces that included urinating in a bucket, using masturbation to generate dramatic vocal effects, and wearing a phallus while copulating with beams of light, she consolidated a reputation as being “the bad girl of dance.” Or as one critic quoted anonymously in the New York Times put it, “the praying mantis in the hothouse of Quebec dance.” Perhaps it was a male critic, unnerved by those visions of raw feminine power. (Chouinard didn’t create a solo for a male performer until the 1999 piece Des feux dans la nuit.)
After more than a decade of performing solo pieces and picking up inspiration in such far-flung places as Bali, Berlin and Nepal, Chouinard formed her own company, Compagnie Marie Chouinard, in 1990. And so began a new phase in Chouinard’s career in which group work took precedence over solos. The first piece to emerge from the company was Les Trous du ciel, a one-act ballet based on Inuit mythology and featuring seven dancers accompanying themselves with muted voices and amplified breathing.
Solos have remained a small part of the company’s repertoire, however: Chouinard herself has since performed on stage alone — for instance, with 2009’s Morning Glories, performed at 8 in the morning in concession to her unease with dancing in public these days.
Given that her work frequently focuses on primal sexuality, on agony and ecstasy, and on strange hybridizations of human and animal (with inanimate objects sometimes welded into the mix), her recent get-together with Hieronymus Bosch would seem like the perfect fit. Le jardin des délices (The Garden of Earthly Delights) is her direct response to the Dutch master’s celebrated triptych, which depicts human pleasures, heavenly reward and a trippy but no less terrifying hell.
“It’s a bit like when I did Rite of Spring and just had to follow Stravinsky,” Chouinard says of this latest piece, commissioned to mark the 500th anniversary of the painter’s death. “Here I just had to follow Bosch. It’s like entering a state of grace when you create with those masters. The feeling is that you are just following the stream somehow. It’s a nice sensation.”
Asked about the process of transforming Bosch’s frozen images into moving bodies, Chouinard launches into a demonstration that consists more of sounds, movements and facial expressions than words. It’s an utterly transfixing glimpse into what has inspired loyal collaborators over the years — people like the company’s star dancer Carol Prieur, costume designer Liz Vandal and composer Louis Dufort, all of whom are involved in the three pieces showing next week. (The other pieces are Le Cri du monde, which was created in 2000, and Soft virtuosity, still humid, on the edge, which is getting its Montreal première.)
A trailer of Le jardin des délices on YouTube has Chouinard’s near-nude dancers cavorting, coupling, howling into microphones, flagellating around garbage cans and at one point moving across the stage like a human centipede. Still “the bad girl of dance” pushing boundaries? Not surprisingly, Chouinard laughingly rebuffs that description.
“Any artist who is truly a creator is stepping into unknown grounds, pushing boundaries,” she insists. “Bach, when he was creating 300 years ago, was pushing boundaries. So for me, the idea of pushing boundaries is as natural as drinking a glass of water. When you are a creator, you are curious — you’re exploring. Life itself is doing that each time it creates a new form. A giraffe? What is this thing? Well, you can say, this is really daring, a long neck like that — what, are you crazy to create something like that!? Or an elephant!
“Life is just joyously exploring possibilities, and coming up with something that’s working. Because almost every form of life, it’s working, it procreates, it makes babies. This is what is important: is it working or not?”