Marie Chouinard hot; Nutcracker frightening
By Morgan Norwich
Issue date: 11/17/05 Section: Arts and Culture
My first encounter with dance occurred when I was four years old. My mother took me to see The Nutcracker and was forced to carry me out of the theatre because I was terrified of the dancing rats. Since then, my experiences with dance shows, ballet or otherwise, have been few and far between. Who'd have thought that that freaked out little kid would grow up to appreciate and thoroughly enjoy a show in which dancers move across the stage with metal canes strapped to their heads and crotches and point shoes on their hands?
Such was Compagnie Marie Chouinard's bODY_rEMIX /gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, whose one-night-only show swept through The Hummingbird Centre on November 3. In bODY_rEMIX, Montreal-based choreographer and performance artist Marie Chouinard's aim was to both liberate and restrain the movement of her company of ten dancers through the use of crutches, parallel bars, prostheses, and harnesses. The whole piece was set to Glenn Gould's 1981 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, distorted and remixed by Louis Dufort. The concept was intriguing, and the result was an extraordinary arousal of human emotion and sexuality. The show began very subtly: a cluster of dancers stood in an upstage corner, quietly preparing themselves to move. As the first dancer stepped into the space, we saw that she walked with one foot bare, the other on point. By simply depriving the dancer of one shoe, her movement took on a rhythm entirely different from what we'd expect of a ballerina on point. This was only the first of many experiments: dancers appeared wearing point shoes on their hands, like pairs of bizarre, avant-garde mittens; they would tap them together, creating subtle rhythms; other times they would move on all fours, singly or in groups, with two shoes on their hands and two on their feet. It was amazing to see how this graceful, animal-like movement was created through the use of something as civilized as a point shoe. In another experiment, two dancers strapped together three-legged-race style, each wearing one point shoe, slowly traversed the stage. Their steps were deliberate as they worked to move as one, and although being strapped together restricted them, there was something beautiful about their dependence on each other.
Such was Compagnie Marie Chouinard's bODY_rEMIX /gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, whose one-night-only show swept through The Hummingbird Centre on November 3. In bODY_rEMIX, Montreal-based choreographer and performance artist Marie Chouinard's aim was to both liberate and restrain the movement of her company of ten dancers through the use of crutches, parallel bars, prostheses, and harnesses. The whole piece was set to Glenn Gould's 1981 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, distorted and remixed by Louis Dufort. The concept was intriguing, and the result was an extraordinary arousal of human emotion and sexuality. The show began very subtly: a cluster of dancers stood in an upstage corner, quietly preparing themselves to move. As the first dancer stepped into the space, we saw that she walked with one foot bare, the other on point. By simply depriving the dancer of one shoe, her movement took on a rhythm entirely different from what we'd expect of a ballerina on point. This was only the first of many experiments: dancers appeared wearing point shoes on their hands, like pairs of bizarre, avant-garde mittens; they would tap them together, creating subtle rhythms; other times they would move on all fours, singly or in groups, with two shoes on their hands and two on their feet. It was amazing to see how this graceful, animal-like movement was created through the use of something as civilized as a point shoe. In another experiment, two dancers strapped together three-legged-race style, each wearing one point shoe, slowly traversed the stage. Their steps were deliberate as they worked to move as one, and although being strapped together restricted them, there was something beautiful about their dependence on each other.
