Mouvements by Compagnie Marie Chouinard

 

Date: 27 november 2013
Place: the Schouwburg Arnhem
Choreography and Artistic Direction: Marie Chouinard
Lighting, Set Design: Marie Chouinar
Music: Louis Dufort
Sound environment: Edward Freedman
Costumes: Marie Chouinard 

 

Marie Chouinard (born on 14 May 1955) is a Canadian dancer, choreographer, and dance company director. She has created more than 50 solo and group works. Chouinard founded her own company in 1990, the COMPAGNIE MARIE CHOUINARD. This choreography ''Mouvements'' is also danced by this company.

Marie Chouinard discovered in 1980 the book Mouvements by Henri Michaux. This book contains 64 pages of India-ink drawings and a poem contains of 15-pages. Marie Chounaird took the pleasure in reading very literally. She read it from left to right, page by page as a choreographic score.
She decrypt the great artist’s drawings and set dance to these "movements of multiple inkjets''.

The transition from the book into dance has been done “ word for word ”, even the poem and the afterword  are included in the choreography. The dancers translated one by one a series of these drawings, switching off periodically like a really team. The drawings were projected on the background with a big beamer so it was really clear to see for the public.

The dancers were dressed all in black and danced on a white floor. That reminds me of the black ink on a white page. The girls did the performance  with loose hair that was one thing I didn’t understand, that interfere the clarity of the movement. I think it was better to took the hair up to make it at clearest as it could be.

Personally I really liked the performance, but I could imagine that for some people the performance could have been too clear, boring at one point. I don't had that feeling at all. The whole choreography was about dancing the projecting , it was every time surprising for me. The dancers were good but not at a really high level. I’ve seen better dancers but these dancers had really their own personality and that was beautiful to see. It was also very physical that makes it nice to watch. 

I really enjoyed this performance. It was very nice and really literally, putting drawing into movement by literally transfiguring it from the page to the body, one after another, again and again, slowly adding more dancers and more variation until a final distilled and transcendent change from black to white and white to black. But for me it never became bored, I was constantly curious and that really works for me.

 

By Nadia Peeters