Masterful variations by Marie Chouinard

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      An emphatic Marie Chouinard takes all of two seconds to make it clear what bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS is not about.

      More than one reviewer has theorized that its strange, dizzying depictions of 10 performers moving about on pointe shoes, crutches, walkers, and other devices are about the pain of dancing itself. The famous Montreal-based choreographer refutes that notion.

      “It’s not about pain; it’s about freedom,” the head of Compagnie Marie Chouinard says with a mixture of strength and passion on the phone from her headquarters. “It’s about how you can move once you have a new device, a new prosthesis, a new organization of your body.”

      The 53-year-old Canadian icon, whose background spans ballet and contemporary dance, goes on: “I consider a pointe shoe like a prosthesis, just like a crutch is a prosthesis. It’s something you put onto your body that allows you to move in a way that you could not move without this prosthesis.”

      Similarly, she says the work is not at all about disability. She recognizes props like walkers and canes are loaded with such associations; her sexualization of them in bODY_rEMIX has even drawn comparisons to David Cronenberg’s creepily erotic film Crash. But Chouinard sees the prosthetics as both tools and metaphors.

      In one of the most highly anticipated dance events of the year, the show’s local debut on Friday and Saturday nights (May 2 and 3) at the Playhouse will give Vancouverites a chance to see what she means. Chouinard created bODY_rEMIX for the Venice Biennale’s International Festival of Contemporary Dance in 2005. She sets it to a score that deconstructs Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, drawing on Glenn Gould’s renditions and clips of him talking about them, and composer Louis Dufort’s Variations on the Variations. Chouinard says the music reflects her own experimentation: just as Bach did variations on an aria, she was looking at different ways to use prosthetics and pointe shoes. “It [bODY_rEMIX] is a game of fascination and joy with exploring possibilities, and Bach was doing exactly the same thing,” she says.

      Despite the shocking imagery she sometimes brings to the stage—past pieces have featured everything from ram’s-horn phalluses to simulated sex and urination into a pail—that sense of joy has been a recurring theme in Chouinard’s work and life. Now, three decades into her career, she has never felt so inspired. “I feel I’m at the beginning of a time where I’m just starting to master my art,” says Chouinard, whose practice has spanned tai chi and meditation and taken her to live in such places as Berlin and Bali. “It’s like learning to ride a bike—well, in my case it took me 30 years to learn to ”˜ride the bike’. So now that I can, I will flip around and skid on my bike and try all kinds of new things.”

      She can also ride it around the globe. Travelling 30 weeks a year, Compagnie Marie Chouinard just spent a few months in China and Europe. And after this Western Canadian jaunt, it flies to Germany to perform Chouinard’s latest creation, Orpheus and Eurydice, and then back for shows in Ottawa and Montreal.

      BODY_rEMIX, like her other work, seems to speak to audiences far beyond the usual dance devotees. “The piece is constructed in a way that someone who has never seen dance in their life could enjoy it,” she explains. “I’m trying to communicate in a very intuitive way. I’m trying to communicate to the soul of the people, so they can be connected to it. I think that’s why my work tours the world.”

      Through it all, Chouinard says, what’s driven her is her happiness and curiosity. “I feel my cellular stuff is made of joy,” she says, and starts gazing around her office for inspiration. “I’m just looking now at my chair and it’s vvvvvrrrrzzzz,” she says, making a buzzing noise and then laughing. “It’s existing! It’s like the blue of this pen that is in front of me now on this table: it’s so blue, it’s such a deep blue—it’s so beautiful it’s radiating, it’s vibrating. It’s totally a mystic experience.”

      Chouinard is famous for opening up bizarre new worlds of dance, movement that has drawn comparisons to animals, machines, and aliens. But there again, the impressions are not exactly right. Chouinard, who spends so much time in her studio sculpting her crack team of dancers and exploring the way they move, says she never feels like she is journeying into an alternate universe. “On the contrary, I feel so real. I’m into reality, but maybe I see reality differently,” she says. “I am always aware of the marvel that life is—that it’s a marvel that I am alive, and that life is ephemeral.”

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