Compagnie Marie Chouinard Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun Friday, April 10, 8pm |
—The Gazette (Venice, Italy)
Program
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, music by Claude Debussy
The Rite of Spring, music by Rober Racine and Igor Stravinsky
About This Performance
Canada’s wild woman of contemporary dance, Marie Chouinard, has explored the poetics of the body in shockingly immediate, intelligible, and ever-surprising ways. The Rite of Spring, her first piece choreographed to an existing musical score, is built around solos — seeking to awaken strong, clear movements in the intimate mystery of each dancer. Stravinsky’s dynamic and dissonant music propels the complex primal movements of this avant-garde interpretation.
Buzzing with animal-like energy, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, uses a gender-reversing solo-dancer to evoke the sensuality and raw energy of her fawn.
Please note: this program contains nudity.
Compagnie Marie Chouinard will be featured in a class being taught through Osher Lifelong Learning in Berkeley: Looking at Dance, Fridays, April 10-May 15, 10am-noon, Room 41B, University Hall (2199 Addison St.).
Artist Biography
The international reputation of the Compagnie Marie Chouinard is the result of 28 years of work by Montreal artist Marie Chouinard. Now a fixture on the world’s major stages and festivals, the company has its roots in Chouinard’s first creation in 1978, the solo Crystallization. This piece, which immediately earned her a reputation for originality, was followed by over 50 choreographic productions, action-performances, vocal works, installations and films, in which she refined her lifelong interest in formal research and the human body. From 1978 to 1990, Marie Chouinard performed alone throughout the world, developing a personal language with a universal resonance.
In 1990 she formed the Compagnie Marie Chouinard. In the dozen works she has created since then, the choreographer has explored the poetics of the body in immediate, intelligible and ever-surprising ways. Each new piece is an odyssey through the history of humanity, while avoiding the chronology of a narrative. In work stripped to its bare essence, a theatrical, quasi-operatic effect is achieved, the elements of “living art” brought to the fore through various techniques of composition and staging. The dancer is presented as a singular entity, a being constructed before our eyes, whose rhythmic configurations are broken down into micro-divisions, analogous to the fluctuations of verbal communication. Although her works may be perceived as provocations, they are better viewed as pathways towards freedom and compassion, where humor is possible and Eros omnipresent. The architecture of the cosmos, the inner intelligence of the body and the inexhaustible complexity of its articulations and mutations harmonize in formally accomplished constructions in which style and substance are in perfect resonance.
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