Program Notes - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

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Back to Back Theatre Ganesh Versus the Third Reich May 16–19, 2013 Presented as part of Bodies of Work Festival “Courageous, confronting, intelligent and magisterially considered theatre… [a] towering achievement.” The Age (Australia) For tickets, visit mcachicago.org or call 312.397.4010. Theater Photo: Jeff Busby
About the Work The Rite of Spring Marie Chouinard’s The Rite of Spring occupies a special position. In choosing to reexamine this powerful hymn to life, she has created her first choreography based on a musical score. Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring explores a New World and marks the entry of dance into modernity. In this avant-garde work, Chouinard finds an original pulsation that is essential to her movement. Far from contradicting the rhythm of her dance, the cadence and force of the music inspire, accompany, and energize her, forming both the echo and the musical counterpoint of an organic, vigorous, and vivid choreography. For Marie Chouinard, all forms are the movement through space of a specific vital energy. Unlike previous choreographers working with Stravinsky’s piece, she constructed her Rite around solos, seeking to awaken in strong, clear movements the intimate mystery of each dancer. “There is no story in my Rite,” she explains, “no development, no cause and effect. Only synchronicity. It is as if I were dealing with the very moment after the instant life first appeared. The performance is the unfolding of that moment. I have the feeling that before that moment there was an extraordinary burst of light, a flash of lightning.” Henri Michaux: Mouvements In 1980, Marie Chouinard discovered the book Mouvements by Henri Michaux (1899–1984). Consisting of sixty-four pages of India-ink drawings, a fifteen-page poem, and an afterword, a 15-page poem and an afterword, Mouvements presents multiform figures that Chouinard took pleasure in reading literally, left to right and page by page, as a choreographic score. She then proceeded to decrypt the great artist’s drawings and set dance to these “movements of multiple inkjets, a celebration of blots, arms moving up and down the scales.” The book’s transition to dance has been done “word for word,” for even the poem in the middle of the book, as well as its afterword, are included in the choreography. The drawings are projected in the background, allowing spectators to do a simultaneous personal reading of the Michaux score. Echoing the visual presentation of a white page with black drawings, performers dressed in black dance on a white floor. IN MUSEUM This performance originated in 2012, when Serge Murphy, guest curator for the 30th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul (Canada), invited artists, including Marie Chouinard, to explore the notion of Minimalism. They were asked to work from the Symposium’s theme "Making the whirling world stand still" (fixer les vertiges), which was inspired by the poem of Arthur Rimbaud from the book A Season in Hell: …I wrote down silences, nights, I wrote down that which could not be said. I stilled vertigoes. Marie Chouinard has described performing IN MUSEUM as always digging in the least of the least, the almost nothing. She devised the work for 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 the dancer. The question or
Page 1 and 2: Compagnie Marie Chouinard The Rite
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Page 13 and 14: Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company
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Page 17 and 18: Humanitas, Étude Poignante, and Mo
Page 19 and 20: Thank You Generous support for the

Program Notes - Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

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