From The Rite of Spring
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Theatre Junction Grand
Tuesday, May 6 - Saturday, May 10
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Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) is a radical piece. Its haunting introduction was adapted from a Slavic folk song, and the music shifts — in “staccato stings” — from instrument to instrument. Often praised for its jagged, explosive rhythms and tribal subject matter (the original ballet with choreography by Vaslav Nijinky involves the story of a virgin sacrifice), the première of the ballet created a furor in 1913. The audience’s response was catcalls and a riot. A new music was born.
Canadian contemporary dance artist Marie Chouinard was drawn to Stravinsky’s wild, discordant harmonies. Yet it was the pulse of Rite of Spring that captured her imagination, to the point where the music opened a new door for the artist. This would mark Chouinard’s first dance creation to pre-existing music (for her, the music is often created after the movement). Her Rite of Spring, created in 1993, has been praised as an avant-garde work renowned for its compelling interpretation. Rather than keeping a narrative or sacrificial theme, Chouinard’s movement is about the moment where life begins.
“For me, (Rite of Spring) is one of the most exciting pieces of Marie’s to perform,” says company dancer Lucie Mongrain. “Marie describes it as the moment of creation of the planet, of anything. [It’s] that moment of conception or the big bang or a plant starting to grow — all of those aspects of creation and that one second where life begins. That’s the piece, for 50 minutes.”
As the choreographer and artistic director who conceived this Rite of Spring, Chouinard states that there is no narrative development in her version — “no cause and result” — adding that the piece is about the start of life in its various manifestations. Chouinard notes that Stravinsky was in the process of creating Rite of Spring when travelling cross-country in Russia (from Brest-Litovsk to Smolensk) in a cattle car that he shared with a bull — yet another manifestation in the piece that includes horn-like extensions on different parts of the dancers. These extensions may relate to horns, phalluses or plants growing as different aspects of life.
As a company dancer, Mongrain feels there is passion and drive behind each of the dancer’s movements. “There are a lot of exciting, really meaty group sections where everyone’s onstage. You really just dance full out in The Rite of Spring,” she says. Mongrain has performed with the company for a decade (in 2000, Chouinard created the solo Étude no. 1 for her).
While for musicians, playing The Rite of Spring is a challenge befitting a virtuoso, for dancers, Chouinard’s choreography to the music is intense on a cardiovascular level. “Some pieces are more cerebral, they’ll have more details or props,” Mongrain says. “[The Rite of Spring] is very primal. It’s a raw kind of energy.” While The Rite of Spring may be described as a primal piece, the dancers must pay meticulous attention to detail. “It’s a piece that you really dance from the inside out,” notes Mongrain. “It’s all about your initiation and your drive.”
Mongrain says that the piece’s movement starts from the dancer’s interior in a true and direct way. The dancer’s connection to their breath is also important. “Marie encourages us to let our breath come out, and to not stifle or hold our breath,” she says. “Sometimes sounds come out just from the pure effort of doing what we’re doing.”
Dancer Carol Prieur, who joined Compagnie Marie Chouinard in 1995, notes Stravinsky’s music is notable for its power. “You can just shut your eyes and just listen to the music and have a certain experience,” she says. “The dance is choreographed as if we are each a conductor to the music, as if the music is coming from the movement. The movement is a mirror of the music.”
The piece, which also includes another layer of music, Signatures Sonores by Rober Racine, is being toured across Europe and North America. The performance will also include Chouinard’s work Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (L’Après-midi d’un faune), a shorter work created from music by Claude Debussy.
“There’s a real sense of poetry in Marie’s creations and her work,” Prieur says, adding Chouinard pushes her work to a place where there is a possibility to have many different interpretations or experiences within it. “There are so many layers in the work where people can be visually or energetically stimulated, where they can go through many different emotions of humanity.” Prieur adds that while Chouinard’s work holds a deep sense of awareness in the poetics of movement, it is often laced with humour. “Her belief in life is one of pleasure, of tasting everything — just that joy of being alive,” she says.
