Dancing About Thinking

I'm not one for high art.

But I make an exception for Marie Chouinard.



Last night I took my wary gal to see Chouinard's latest, bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS - at Calgary's oldest theater The Grand. This morning I noticed the connection between the building, swathed in construction drapery and girded by temporary scaffold, and the dancers on Chouinard's stage rebuilt by their temporary prosthetic extensions. Within the theater, bodies retrofit. Without, the building undergoing its own remix.



But let me step back for a moment. Marie Chouinard is in my opinion the most talented and visionary choreographer working today. She hails from Montreal but has lived abroad in New York, Berlin, Bali and Nepal. I was introduced to her aesthetic in 2000 with the performance of 24 Preludes by Chopin and Le Cri du Monde and found myself immediately captivated by the precision of her group's movement, the playfulness of her staging, and her perverse sense of humor. Her work appeals to me because it walks a beautiful tension between the sensual and the cerebral. The body is her instrument, no doubt, but she uses its contortions and creations to communicate heady and silly ideas.



In the new bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, she equips her dancers with walkers, canes and imaginary bodily extensions that both support and limit their range of movement. They wear pointe shoes on their hands and walk like gazelles. They're fitted with poles, rods, ropes and harnesses and scuttle like crabs, dangle like larvae. Dueling females lunge for each other and feint away on glinting steel crutches. Dueling men thrust and parry suspended between barres that make an attenuated boxing ring, their chests and pelvises twin ends of the muscled weapons of their torsos. A single female transposes her body across a five-tiered barre as if it's a musical staff and her limbs the notes, shifting tonality.



The first act felt more intellectual to me, an introduction to and exhaustion of the performance's central ideas. In the second act, I discovered myself emotionally engaged, and more amused, as Chouinard stripped away the pretense of the alien bodily configurations to get at the human cores within. I sympathized with the man on his cane shuffling offstage, shoulders slumping and legs bowed. I felt for the woman rising on wire assemblies, twisting and fighting against her bonds like a caterpillar pushing at the edges of its cocoon for the relief of release.



And I was struck again by something that's been on my mind a lot the last few years: the way time changes our bodies, stunting and sapping their former fluidity and elasticity, their strength and stretch. Time, that most heinous thief, forces us from our four good limbs (if we're lucky enough to start with them all) to an accreted, augmented coral of biomechanical supplements: our walkers, our back and knee braces, our wheelchairs, and finally, that last of the bodily extensions, our deathbed.

Again: Chouinard moves bodies, but she really gets your head going too. It's dancing about thinking.

Good review here: The Dance Current