Compagnie Marie Chouinard

By Sid Smith

 

Choreography--and all art, for that matter--springs from unseen places, a mysterious process of creation that stems from plenty of sources, artists report, from personal experience to global events.

 

Marie Chouinard, the Montreal-based choreographer whose eponymous company is about to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, has about as singular a source for her version of "The Rite of Spring" as you can imagine: an hallucinatory vision.

 

"It came to me while I was having an hallucinatory experience during a fast," she said, a fast she undertook for spiritual reasons. "I suddenly heard the music," not on a recording, but in her mind, "and as I listened to it out of curiosity, it was going through my spine and my body."

 

It was "obvious that this was my music, linked to my body, my soul, my history as a human being," she continued about the famous Igor Stravinsky score, "and I could not get around it. I needed to choreograph it."

 

She fought herself for at least a month, partly because, back during this period in the 1990s, it would represent the first work she'd ever choreographed to a pre-existing score--she always worked with original music before that. But she couldn't resist.

 

One aspect was never a part of her own process--she wasn't responding in any way to the renowned Nijinsky original that was such a controversy in its debut, even though this revival of her "Rite" coincides with the 100th anniversary of that work's notorious 1913 premiere.

 

"Frankly, I had to fight against that notion, I had no interest in choreographing in response to that work, I had to put aside the dramatic aspect of its historical attachment," she said. "That subject matter is of no interest to me. Human sacrifice is repellent." Instead, her work is all her own.

 

"I tried to translate the music through the spine, the limbs, the verticality of the body, the way this music is shattering to your own system," she said. "That is my only story. Telling the story of the multilayered rhythms happening in that music, reflecting on them, adding one more level, the rhythms as manifested in the body. It's more like the music is the unfolding of the big bang, which they say lasted not even a second. If I could unfold it into a 35-minute period, it would be 'The Rite of Spring.'"

 

Chouinard's highly intelligent and yet simultaneously visceral approach to her art is also evident when she talks about the other work on the MCA bill, "Henri Michaux: Mouvements." Developed over a 10-year period, beginning with solo work, "Mouvements" is almost literally a case of Chouinard taking drawings by the late Belgian artist Michaux in a book and extending them off the page and onto the stage in dance.

 

"I took one of his books and, page after page, it was as if he sent me choreographic notation," she said. "I started with the first page and went to the second and then the third, chronologically through the book, and created movements from them."

 

Bubbly and warm, Chouinard says her career in dance actually started from an interest in theater. "I wanted to be an actor," she said, "and I thought an actor needs to be totally incarnated into his or her body. I didn't feel that I was."

 

And the theater school to which she applied put her on a waiting list. So, to bide her time, she took a dance class. "And there I was," she said.

 

"Being put on a waiting list was the best thing that ever happened to me," she added with a laugh. "Life is great."