Text by Marina Cappa

‍

In the beginning there is water. A little girl in a pool, the stroke from the perfect arc, the head dipping in and out again, the cadenced breathing, the silent sound of breath, the body advancing from one pool to another. A smooth, precise movement. Until, to a certain point, "suddenly I was entering a different dimension of being."

Marie Chouinard did not become a champion swimmer. But those days at the pool to Lorraine, near to Montréal, were decisive, "my first real contact with the love of dance: I had never experienced such a deep feeling, such a close connection with movement and breath."

Much has changed from then. This lady, who is now 68 and her very long, once tawny hair now bleached white, has won awards, served as director of the Biennale Danza from 2017 to 2020, danced, started to her own company, and choreographed shows that are often taken up in repertoire from others.

"I dance with the nervous system, force fields, voice, breath, spirit, thought, memory, and even the genetic code."

His latest work - " M " - premiered in January at the Grand Théâtre de Québec, and was then staged at the Théâtre Maisonneuve in Montréal. Before arriving to Spoleto in its national premiere, it stopped to Munich and to Madrid in the spring.

In addition to the choreography and vocal score, Chouinard signs the scenes, lights, costumes. Even the wigs: brightly colored helmets on the heads of the dancers and dancers. Whose sonic breath moves to fill the space, composing a musical score on which the protagonists dance - naked from the waist up - in pants as garish as toupees.

"Artist of the body," as she likes to describe herself, the dancer and choreographer thus returns to the origin, to the breath from from which life is born, awakening emotions. Of this "pulse that shakes the lungs and bones" raw material is the breath of the 11 dancers. Among them is the "veteran" Carol Prieur, who had joined Compagnie Marie Chouinard in 1995 and also became the star of the film of Cantique no. 1, directed by the choreographer.

"Suddenly you feel that you are in touch with the whole."

Between " M " and Marie Chouinard's first work, Cristallisation, run 45 years.

The future choreographer was born to Quebec, Canada. Her family includes journalists and singers. Her mother, before giving birth to five children of whom Marie is the eldest, was an actress.

To dancing comes after swimming, Tai Chi classes, and the dream of acting. "I needed to feel that I owned a body: when I was swimming I realized it, but outside - in normal life - I didn't feel it on me. So I started to taking dance classes," she recalls.

At first, however, it is for himself that he wants to dance, not for others.

Until, in 1978, she debuts her Cristallisation, set in an art gallery and as a soundtrack a metal grid rubbed by musician Robert Racine. On opening night, as she waits to enter the stage, she sees snow falling, opens the window, and in the flakes that "crystallize" on her palm she senses a sign for her future.

There followed years of sometimes debated performances, such as when she urinated in a bucket(Petite danse sans nome, 1980), or masturbated(Marie chien noir, 1982). Meanwhile, as she wins the definition of "priestess of choreography choc," she works studying every physical detail, every muscle. From her toes to her back, which becomes her favorite "piece." Until -- later, with Soft virtuosity, still humid, on the edge -- to making her eyes dance, her mouth. Because, he says, "there is a beauty in seeing how a face can transform from horror to enlightenment."

"I write inside the dancers' bodies."

In 1986 the Compagnie Marie Chouinard was founded. The first show is Les trous du ciel. The "holes in the sky" are the Inuit expression to describe the stars, and the ballet choreographs a humanity that comes to life, dancers with primal breaths enveloped in a dark and cold "pole light": far from the chromatic illuminations of " M ", yet akin in the search for the original breath.

In the decades to to follow, important performances are born.

Le sacre du printemps comes to the stage 80 years after the debut of Stravinsky's ballet choreographed from Nižinsky in 1913. "It is the instant of creation, the moment before life appears: I dance to escape nothingness, to try to to heal life a little, which is wonderful but often hurts us," Chouinard interprets. It is, he explains, a music not only from listen to but from feel vibrating in the bones as the dancers' bodies are clad in claws, horns, antennae.

She herself long before had fitted herself with prosthetics, when she made Après-midi d'un faune, from Mallarmé's poem and Nižinsky's ballet, in 1987: instead of Debussy, a soundtrack produced by the devices affixed to her, on a leotard from sprouting stingers and a large male member.

In bODY_remix/les_vARIATIONS_gOLDBERG, created for the 2005 Dance Biennial, the stylistic choice becomes extreme and the protagonists on stage dance with casts, crutches, bandages, walkers, instruments that constrain and twist movements. And which, however, through harnesses and ropes then allow them to soar in an aerial dance that becomes a hymn to eroticism. A spectacular result, from to which the author also made a film.

"My impulse is to explore unknown lands."

With film, the choreographer experiments under different circumstances. She participates in the documentary Madwoman of God, which reconstructs the story of the mystic Marie de l'Incarnation, and explains how trance is akin to the experience of dancing and how the contractions originated by the genital muscles then reverberate throughout the entire organism, until to a kind of "explosion." Author of the poetry book Chantier des extases, Chouinard also has a writing pendant and most recently published Zéro douze, fragments of childhood, between memoirs and drawings.

His artistic versatility is found in ballets. In Jérôme Bosch: le jardin des délices, created for the 500th anniversary of the Flemish artist's death, in front of the reproduction of the triptych, and some magnified details, the dancers in briefs, twists and ascents, take the forms of the painted characters. Just as in Henri Michaux: mouvements (2011), the company builds a "choreographic storyboard" that - in front of the backdrop representing them - gives physical life to the drawings to ink of the poet painter, reproducing their images in black costumes.

Chouinard also calls himself an "architect," because "the basis of what I do is very concrete, kinetic, material; I build, process, explore," and he also created an app - Cantique - with which to change a dancer's face and sound in real time.