Dancers Mathilde Monnard and Dominique Porte in Marie Chouinard’s “The Rite of Spring.”
Marie Chouinard
Usually at least once a season, TITAS/Dance Unbound slaps the label “Unfiltered” on a show it’s presenting. That almost always means nudity in the work of a company in the AT&T Performing Arts Center-based series. Think Western European, following in the dance steps of Pina Bausch (Germany) and Maguy Marin (France), master choreographers who sometimes made the aesthetic choice to have their dancers bare some or all of it.
In his humorously direct tagline for these shows, TITAS director Charles Santos implores, “If you’re easily offended, don’t come.”
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The latest performance to fit the moniker is by French adjacent Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Montreal-based Unfiltered veterans returning to Dallas with a pair of works featuring topless female (and male) dancers as a followup to the similarly unclothed Garden of Earthly Delights in 2022.
“It’s simply part of the work. The body is our basis. It’s our medium,” artistic director Chouinard told Dance Magazine in 2014 for an article about nudity in concert dance. “If you dress it with a specific costume, then of course you refer to a specific time in a specific culture. If not, it can be from 2,000 years ago, or from the year 4000. There are very few ways of presenting the body that keep it outside of time.”
Her explanation mostly squares with the fantastical spectacles she makes from historical material in other art forms. While literally dateable — Garden is a takeoff on Bosch’s 1490s triptych of heaven, hell and Earth — Chouinard’s pieces are so wildly imaginative that they seem to derive as much from her subconscious as her sources even when she adheres faithfully to the original imagery.
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Chouinard’s latest Dallas program includes the choreographer’s take on The Rite of Spring as well as the recent Magnificat, inspired by Bach’s first major liturgical composition, which was written in 1723 for a baroque orchestra and five vocalists singing the text of the biblical canticle in Latin.
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As central as the nudity is her self-conscious acknowledgment that this is a performance. Scenes appear to take place before and after what an audience would normally witness.
“It opens unusually with the dancers stretching and warming up to the sound of an orchestra similarly tuning up and the audience chatting. At the end, we see them cool down,” critic David Mead wrote last year of Magnificat, which he described as “tongue in cheek,” in the online publication Seeing Dance. “After a sports-like pre-game huddle, lights to black, and we’re off.
“When the lights return, we find all the dancers are topless, wearing only skin-toned trunks and socks, and wide-brimmed headwear that look like hats from one angle and halos from another as they glow gold in the light. There are a lot of jiggling breasts but the sight is hardly shocking and it soon becomes unnoticeable.”
Dancers Carol Prieur and James Viveiros in Marie Chouinard’s “The Rite of Spring.”
Nicolas Ruel
For Rite and her other Nijinsky-inspired choreography, The Afternoon of a Faun, Chouinard sticks to the source while also flipping it on its head. Now 70, she danced the central male role in her 1987 Afternoon with both bare breasts and a prosthetic phallus. It wasn’t the first time a woman played the part, though she took the exploration of the male libido further.
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Chouinard’s prosthetics and other provocative props make her dancers look like animal-like creatures. For Rite, she removes the storyline of a virgin being sacrificed for the sake of seasonal renewal.
“There is no story in my Rite, no development, no cause and effect, only synchronicity,” she explains on her website. “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.”
Seattle Times critic Michael Upchurch picked up on the imagery in his 2013 review.
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“Its power stems in part from Chouinard’s ceaselessly inventive movement: an ever-evolving hybrid of human and animal body language where birds, horses, stags and other creatures seem to lurk, lurch and prowl in human guise,” he wrote of her signature work, created more than 30 years ago. “The piece’s energy also springs directly from its astonishingly gifted dancers, who perform bare-chested (men and women alike), their faces daubed in painted stripes.”
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Details
May 1-2 at 7:30 p.m. at Moody Performance Hall, 2520 Flora St. $43-$97. attpac.org.