Dance UbuWeb

Marie Chouinard (b. 1955) bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS (2005) 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.