In the framework of the Night of Museums:
MARIE CHOUINARD
In 1978 Marie Chouinard presented her first work, Crystallization, which immediately established her as an exceptional artist driven by an infectious search for the genuine. After 12 years as a solo performer and choreographer, Marie Chouinard founded her own company in 1990, the Compagnie Marie Chouinard.
Marie Chouinard has lived in New York, Berlin, Bali and Nepal. Her travels, her curiosity, her eclectic studies and her understanding of various techniques allow her to explore the body in different ways. She has created more than 50 solo and group works. The works created since 1978 reflect the concerns of this surprising choreographer: her view of dance as a sacred art, her respect for the body as a vehicle of that art, her virtuoso approach to performance and the invention of a different universe for each new piece.
In Marie Chouinard’s alphabet, elements respond to one another as in a classical structure while integrating different cultural understandings of the body as infinitely intelligent. Her raw material is the dancers’ flesh, bones and muscles, the instinct and vital impulse of the human body whose intimate connections she exposes. As a carrier of meaning, each gesture becomes the “phoneme” of a thought imbedded in the body, while form reflects the dancer’s soul as it resides in organs, cells and energetic circuits. Celebrating the human body as a vehicle of life, Marie Chouinard and her contributors work together to create choreographic pieces that reveal a world of primal light, coded sounds and protean forms, through vigorous and incandescent movements.
IN MUSEUM
Performance
Length: 3h
Serge Murphy, guest curator for the 30th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul has invited artists, including Marie Chouinard, to explore the notion of stark simplicity, working from the theme of "making the whirling world stand still" (“fixer les vertiges”), inspired by a poem by Arthur Rimbaud. In the art space, Marie Chouinard has created IN MUSEUM "always digging in the least of the least, the almost nothing."
The performance takes place in a room through which the public freely circulates. A visitor is invited to enter a designated space and ask a question or make a request of dancer Marie Chouinard, be it personal or universal.
Marie’s performance brings to mind white-clad Pythia, the prophetess of Delphi. This ancient Greek character delivered her prophecies in a trance and a language that only priests of the temple knew how to interpret.
A personalized reply will emerge from each exchange between the artist and her visitor, a free dance of dazzling spontaneity.
Between each interview, the dancer takes time to refocus before embodying the next visitor’s inner world and aspirations.
The history of the Pythia and the act of divination may remain a mystery, but the inscription at the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi has lost none of its truth: "Know thyself and thou will know the universe and the gods.”
Creation: Marie Chouinard
Performer: Marie Chouinard
Costumes and props: Marie Chouinard - Assistant (costumes): Jacinthe Loranger
Stage manager: Caroline Nadeau
Photos: Sylvie-Ann Paré
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