bODY_remix/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS

Featuring the Compagnie Marie Chouinard. Produced by Dancing on the Edge and DanceHouse. At the Vancouver Playhouse on Saturday, May 3. No remaining performances

Night and day, black and white, good and evil—the contrasts between the two halves of Marie Chouinard’s bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS weren’t quite that extreme, but you get the picture. The Montreal choreographer’s alternately thrilling and perplexing tour de force was effectively two shows in one, with a first part that was warmly enveloping and a second that was all about angst, isolation, and sexual display.

It’s possible that Chouinard was illuminating the differences between soundtrack inspiration Glenn Gould’s 1955 version of Bach’s iconic keyboard opus, a startling feat of youthful invention, and his late-career interpretation from 1981, a technologically enhanced essay in bionic perfection. Equally likely, she might have been giving us a glimpse of Eden before ushering in some postapocalyptic hell. Her initial idyll had humans throwing impossibly lovely shapes while herds of dancerly ungulates, prosthetic hooves attached to their hands, roamed the stage. After intermission, the curse of self-consciousness had descended on the land, every dancer was differently disabled, and long-billed mosquitoes brought the plague.

The contrast was striking, as was the work itself.

Chouinard has deliberately courted controversy throughout her career, on-stage urination being but one of her provocative strategies. With bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, she’s playing off—some would say exploiting—disability art: although her 11 dancers have the most ductile bodies imaginable, she’s kitted them up with an assortment of canes, crutches, and walking frames. In a recent interview with this magazine’s Janet Smith, she disavowed the obvious themes of injury, age, and the toll that modern dance takes on the body, and that seems honest enough: here, the chief effect was sculptural. Using their simple prostheses to lever themselves off the ground, support elongated stretches, or jerk themselves across the stage like primitive cyborgs, Chouinard’s dancers achieved an extremity of form that would otherwise have been impossible to sustain.

My one complaint about this otherwise stunning show is that, in contrast to the seamless group dynamics of the opening segment, bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS’ second half seemed arbitrary and episodic—especially when Chouinard attempted to leaven the darkness with a few visual puns. In one, a male dancer used a phallic cane, strapped to his groin, to play a ballet barre like a bell; it was laugh-out-loud funny, but it was also an unnecessary intrusion into a deeply serious undertaking.

In spite of its discontinuities, however, Part 2 yielded the strongest individual images, like the one in which a female dancer, supported by an overhead cable clipped to an S & M–style harness, “walked” on the upraised hands of her seated colleagues. And Manuel Roque’s solo wrung gasps of astonishment from the crowd: moving in time to Gould’s electronically slurred and distorted speaking voice, he mirrored every inflection with his precisely articulated torso.

Similar displays of strength, beauty, and weirdness occurred throughout bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, rendering its very occasional failings irrelevant to its overall success.