By ORA BRAFMANMARIE CHOUINARD COMPANY’S performance of ‘Henry Michaux Movements’(photo credit: Courtesy)
On her third visit to Tel Aviv, Canadian choreographer Marie Chouinard brings back her major creation – The Rite of Spring, a rendition of work originally created by Vaslav Nijinsky (1913) to accompany the revolutionary score by Stravinsky.Chouinard found a way to develop an original outlook both on the individual’s body and the common tribal interactions, and fill the stage with a group of 10 strong dancers with overwhelming energies and erupting animalistic passions.Contrary to dozens of other renditions, Chouinard concentrates on the individual and marks him with a tight circle of light, separating him from others by blackened space. In the first moments we receive encapsulated image of the work’s essence, in a single, bare-chested dancer. She is entrapped by the light, confined, and tries to get free using deconstructed moves, with swift changes of direction and focus, who jumps and stomps like an animal, dancing to survive.Chouinard developed numerous variations with extended movement options for all her dancers, without losing intensity. Another element which contributed to the dance’s layered content and gave it a visual signature were the curved horns used by the dancers.For the second part of the evening, the company presented Henry Michaux Movements (2011).A daring attempt to use dance and movement as a tool for dialogue, not only with the poetry and text of Henry Michaux, but also with 64 drawings he made for his book, Movements.The drawings appeared consecutively on the right panel of the backdrop. Each dancer tries to portray the drawing with his body, with some matches working better than others. The fragmented structure enabled the audience to follow the process and its outcome, which was both interesting and lyrical, in a way.The overall concept was brilliant, but the execution seemed to lose momentum toward the end.
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