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Dancers Mathilde Monnard and Dominique Porte in Marie Chouinard’s “The Rite of Spring.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Marie Chouinard<\/p>\n
Usually at least once a season, TITAS\/Dance Unbound<\/a> slaps the label \u201cUnfiltered\u201d on a show it\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n In his humorously direct tagline for these shows, TITAS director Charles Santos implores, \u201cIf you\u2019re easily offended, don\u2019t come.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s simply part of the work. The body is our basis. It\u2019s our medium,\u201d artistic director Chouinard told Dance Magazine in 2014 for an article about nudity in concert dance. \u201cIf 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Her explanation mostly squares with the fantastical spectacles she makes from historical material in other art forms. While literally dateable \u2014 Garden is a takeoff on Bosch\u2019s 1490s triptych of heaven, hell and Earth \u2014 Chouinard\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Make Dallas News a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Chouinard\u2019s latest Dallas program includes the choreographer\u2019s take on The Rite of Spring as well as the recent Magnificat, inspired by Bach\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt 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,\u201d critic David Mead wrote last year of Magnificat, which he described as \u201ctongue in cheek,\u201d in the online publication Seeing Dance. \u201cAfter a sports-like pre-game huddle, lights to black, and we\u2019re off.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Dancers Carol\u00a0Prieur and James Viveiros in Marie Chouinard’s “The Rite of Spring.”<\/p>\n Nicolas Ruel<\/p>\n 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\u2019t the first time a woman played the part, though she took the exploration of the male libido further.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Chouinard\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no story in my\u202fRite, no development, no cause and effect, only synchronicity,\u201d she explains on her website. \u201cIt 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Seattle Times critic Michael Upchurch picked up on the imagery in his 2013 review.\u00a0<\/p>\n By signing up, you agree to our Terms Of Use<\/a> and acknowledge that your information will be used as described in our Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIts power stems in part from Chouinard\u2019s 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,\u201d he wrote of her signature work, created more than 30 years ago. \u201cThe piece\u2019s energy also springs directly from its astonishingly gifted dancers, who perform bare-chested (men and women alike), their faces daubed in painted stripes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Details\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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