At Premiere Dance Theatre in Toronto, on Tuesday
The body is our only irreducible reality, and we are always reinventing it. Most of the time, the pace of change is slow; but occasionally someone accelerates it so much, throws so many hypotheses of the physical in our faces with such rapidity and power, that we reel back and wonder: Is that us? And we cannot say no.
Marie Chouinard brought her Montreal dance troupe to Toronto's Harbourfront Centre Tuesday night, and in her generous, implacable way brought the body to destruction and radiant new life. Her new work, Le Cri du monde, is a masterpiece. Anyone with the slightest interest in dance, and in the shells of flesh we inhabit and imagine, should rush to see it.
Chouinard has always been an innovator of the primeval. Her dances look like no one else's, yet they seem to show us things that have always existed, primitive things that live in us now, though we have forgotten how to perceive them. Le Cri du monde is an act of espionage, a way of stealing a glance at the secret beings we are, and are always becoming.
The nine dancers don't look like us at first. They have hands that curl in like residual hooves, arms that twitch like insect limbs, and mouths that scream without making a sound. They are a social group, but the skin of their society has been removed, and their actions seem to predate distinctions of public and private. They are a savage tribe, performing what looks like a sacred improvisation.
But there is something in what they do that refuses to be perceived from a safe distance. Their movement and its metaphors work on you from the inside, from the guts and the brain stem, the parts that respond before thought can organize things. Chouinard appeals to the intelligence of the body, not the mind, and her aim has never been more sure.
The most intense sections of the dance were the solos and duos, including an unforgettable duet for two women that defined to perfection the peculiar erotic power that moves through all of Chouinard's choreography.
Louis Dufort's electroacoustic score filled the space around the dancers so completely I felt at times as though it were the real costuming, or at least a vital accessory to the scant yet highly effective designs of Liz Vandal and Jacques-Lee Pelletier. Alex Morgenthaler's lighting included many inspired elements, here and also in 24 Preludes by Chopin, which received its North American premiere.
Chopin's decorous Op. 28 could hardly seem more remote from the ordered chaos of Chouinard's universe. But that's only till the dance begins, and reveals a side of this familiar music that probably no one before Chouinard has heard in quite this way before. A central motif of her choreography is a fluttering movement of hands, which leads her into a range of brisk movements that look definite and involuntary at once, just like the actual movements of birds. That involuntary quality links with another kinetic theme, the manipulation of bodies as though they were puppets. At several points, a dancer becomes her own marionette, or yanks another around by the hair, or turns into a floppy doll that is dragged by one pair of arms to another. And so play collides with cruelty, and ornament with instinct, and the dark forbidding side of Chopin's music surmounts the surface charm and loveliness.
Unfortunately, a few miscues with lights and the taped music marred the opening. But nothing could seriously detract from the triumph of Marie Chouinard and of her extraordinary troupe: Kirsten Andersen, Elijah Brown, Julio Cesar Hong, Sandrine Lafond, Carla Maruca, Lucie Mongrain, Isabelle Poirier, Luciane Pinto, Troy Sellers and Peter Trosztmer. Compagnie Marie Chouinard performs at Harbourfront's Premiere Dance Theatre through Saturday.