Compagnie Marie Chouinard at DanceHouse

When last the iconic Montreal-based choreographer Marie Chouinard came through town with her eponymous dance company--presenting a new work, The Golden Mean, commissioned by DanceHouse under the auspices of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad--I was not a happy camper. I was vexed at having been displaced from our usual seats in the front orchestra section of the Playhouse by the long ramp jutting into the audience that Chouinard had requested as part of her set. And the compensation of being relocated to premium seats onstage with the dancers hardly mitigated my displeasure; from there I could see up close just how underdeveloped was Chouinard's choreography and how overcooked her accompanying theatricality (which, among other things, involved the dancers donning Stephen Harper masks at one point).

Let's just say with DanceHouse's latest presentation of her work, Chouinard has redeemed herself, reaffirming her place in the pantheon of major dance artists in this country and internationally. The evening was made up of two of Chouinard's more recent pieces, each experimenting in its own way with the idea of the dance score. The first, Gymnopédies, is set to the famously atmospheric piano compositions of the same name by Erik Satie. Written in 3/4 time, each with a similar structure and theme, the three works subtly juxtapose dissonant melodies against the harmony, producing an achingly melancholic effect that has influenced ambient music up to the present day (including electronic composers like Moby, who samples Gymnopédies on his blockbuster album Play). Given that the title of Gymnopédies connotes images of nude dancing (which, to be sure, Chouinard plays upon), Satie's music would seem to be a natural source of inspiration for any choreographer. But Chouinard is not just any choreographer and part of the conceit of her own score to Gymnopédies is that she didn't just have her dancers learn a new set of movement phrases; each of them also had to learn to play Satie's music, which they take turns performing live at the grand piano positioned stage left.

That the touch and caress of piano keys is an act of kinesis as virtuosic as the most complex or gymnastic of dance moves is made clear at the start of Chouinard's piece. The lights come up on a clump of draped forms stage right. A lone woman clad in black enters from the wings and crosses to centre stage. She then sinks to the floor in a split, rocking back and forth with her pelvis as she alternately domes and flexes her extended feet. Rising from the floor, she then takes a seat at the piano (also draped in cloth) and without a concomitant stretching of her fingers she begins to play the first of Satie's compositions. As she bends her body over the keyboard, communing rhythmically with the piano in a way that gives new meaning to the idea of a dancer's musicality, we notice the draped forms stage right begin to move, fingers and hands and arms slowly emerging from openings at their tops. One by one the rest of Chouinard's company of dancers reveals themselves, each nude, like a newborn butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. In pairs, the dancers then slowly walk upstage, slipping between a crack in the curtain.

Following this opening our original pianist is relieved by another member of the company, who provides accompaniment to an energetic duet between one of the male dancers and the tallest of the female dancers, whose towering leg extensions and impossibly deep and wide pliés (a Chouinard trademark) are magnified all the more by her point shoes. However, Chouinard is not only (or even primarily) interested in a serious technical exploration of the links between musical and dance virtuosity. This becomes clear when a trio of female dancers comes out sporting clown noses and, via their comically unsyncopated poses and arm movements, the pathos of Satie's music turns to bathos. Indeed, buffoonery and burlesque are key elements of the piece, with couples forming and splitting and reforming, both along and across gender lines; the action spilling into the audience; not one but several false endings; and the live playing of the Satie score being usurped at certain points by recorded versions emanating from portable CD players.

I took the latter bit to be Chouinard's acknowledgement that Satie's music, as beautiful and haunting as it remains, has become something of a cultural cliche, in part via its endless recycling and re-citation (including, as mentioned above, by DJs like Moby). On the other hand, that the archive of any artistic form eventually becomes part of the repertoire of contemporary performance was also made clear by Chouinard's own multiple references to dance history; repeated scenes of solo and mutual masturbation (including, most memorably, on an electronic keyboard) can't help but evoke recollections of another great pairing of musical and dance scores, in this case Vaslav Nijinsky's scandalous short ballet L'après-midi d'un faune, choreographed to the symphonic poem of the same name by Claude Debussy.

Debussy's own work was based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, so it is fitting that in the second work on last night's program, Henri Michaux: Mouvements, Chouinard adapts a work by another French poet. In particular, she takes inspiration from a book by Michaux in which a long poem that's all about motility (the "Mouvements" of both Michaux's and Chouinard's titles) is accompanied by 64 pages of India-ink drawings. Looking at these drawings, which take various biomorphic forms, Chouinard had a revelation: she had in her hands a complete dance score. Her task, then, was to create a catalogue of both stilled poses and travelling movements to accompany each of the drawings.

As the drawings are projected successively on an upstage screen, Chouinard's dancers take turns "figuring" with their bodies what we see on the page, their black clad silhouettes sometimes matching with uncanny precision and at other times only suggestively approximating the series of blots. As the images speed up and become more complex, the dancers form architectural duos or trios, various extended and moving limbs or stretched out bits of leotard evoking the multiplicity of Michaux's brushstrokes. Indeed, my favourite part of the piece is when the entire company performs one of the drawings in unison, the more animated and "dancey" the movement the more cinematic and montage-like the images. Indeed, the whole piece has the feel of a flip book of Rorschach drawings brought to stunning three-dimensional life.

Chouinard even takes into consideration the blank white space of Michaux's pages, with one of the dancers crawling at a certain point under the white Marley flooring to read out the central poem of the book, and with the whole piece culminating in a sped up and simultaneous reverse negative, if you will, of the slower and more methodical serial presentation of each of the drawings. I refer to the fact that at the end the harsh white light illuminating the stage cuts to black as, under a single focused strobe, the dancers, now stripped to their underwear, improvise movements based on what we've just seen.

Henri Michaux: Mouvements is a triumph of inter-artistic dialogue, and in a way that makes neither form subservient to the other, nor that seeks to produce an exact match between them. Indeed, Chouinard shows us the utter impossibility of such a task, as with the additional elements of time, space and audience co-presence, what we think we see and what we know we feel will always be pleasurably incommensurable.

P.

All That Glitters

As a dancer and choreographer, Marie Chouinard incites devotion in her fans that borders on sexual ecstasy or religious mania--which is entirely appropriate given how often she taps into both of these phenomena to create her works. I am most familiar with her 2005 piece bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, in which she sends her dancers out en pointe, in harnesses, with crutches and other prostheses, wheeling barres, and otherwise constrained, in order to explore, among other ruminations on corporeal extension, the dis-abled body's relation to dance. But I have only seen excerpts of that work performed on video. Last night's world premiere performance of The Golden Mean (Live) at the Vancouver Playhouse in a DanceHouse and 2010 Cultural Olympiad co-production, was--as per the tautological parenthesis--the first dance by Chouinard I have experienced live. Entirely appropriate, therefore, that as part of my initiation into the cult of Marie I should be seated on stage.

This coincidence owed to the fact that as part of the stage design for the piece, Chouinard constructed a raised platform that jutted out into the audience, taking out several rows of seats, including those that Richard and I had bought as part of our DanceHouse subscription. Our reward for this inconvenience was the unique opportunity to view the performance from the stage itself. And while this certainly offered a novel vantage point--with Chouinard deliberately disrupting the uniformity of an ideal viewpoint signaled by her title--I can't say it gave me any deeper insight into the piece.

Nor any clear sense of why the platform-cum-catwalk was needed in the first place. Chouinard's dancers certainly made use of it, variously strutting out on it, or pushing props and huge lights to its edges. But its most regular use, as far as I could tell, was as a viewing platform for members of the company not dancing to look back at the members on stage who were. This was just one of several dramaturgical choices throughout the evening that left me confounded.

There was certainly an abundance of Chouinard's visual and aural trademarks on display: costumes that mixed a futuristic aesthetic with cowboy kitsch, and that featured Chouinard's ubiquitous unisex pasties; masks overtop masks; Louis Dufort's electro-acoustic score layered overtop the dancers' own abbreviated sentences and vocal eruptions; and props, props, props. But, as I feel is so often the case with Chouinard, the superabundance of theatricality stands in for a strong through-line, both thematically and in terms of movement. What little I could glean in the former department suggested a Hedwigesque riff on a Platonic origin myth, with the piece beginning with a bodily splitting of two twinned dancers in a process akin to cellular mitosis, and ending in a frankly clichéd and purely theatrical use of total nudity.

As for the dancing, there simply needed to be more of it. One of the things my on-stage vantage point afforded me was the opportunity to see how often most members of Chouinard's company were off-stage. And what they were doing while off-stage, which was mostly affixing props or adjusting costumes.

In a medium that "classically" is all about proportion (of position, of line, of gesture, of bodies), not to mention the variation in and of proportion, it seemed strange not to explore both the beauty and the constraints of this approach to the spaces of and between bodies in more extended pure movement sequences. After the fierce intelligence of Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot's starkly theatrical Dark Matters, the overall fussiness of The Golden Mean just struck me as banal, a lot of bells and whistles which betrayed the paucity of ideas underneath.

Leaving audiences scratching their heads about what it all means is not necessarily a sign of artistic profundity, despite what Chouinard herself states in her own rather opaque choreographic statement accompanying this work. I certainly look forward to seeing more work by Quebec's favourite dance export in the future; I just hope it's more "thought-provoking" than this.

P.