Critical Perspective of Compagnie Marie Chouinard's Orpheus and Eurydice by Natalie Meisner

Orpheus and Eurydice contains many of the trademark Chouinard elements:
otherworldly simmering sexuality, gravity defying lifts and leaps, utterly committed physicality, and costuming that highlights the conflicted and conflicting forces that meet at the site of the human body. Chouinard’s choreography is provocative and demanding. It causes us to rethink the limits, not only of the performer’s body, but of the human body. What is our own body, after all? A package, a possession, a prosthesis, an object, or a point of contact with the outside world?

The piece evokes both the devastation of tragedy and the bawdy roots of comedy. This is especially noticeable in the hilarious, sensual, and oddly touching segment where the dancers wear (or are worn by) their oversized phalluses which seem to almost pull them across the stage cavorting and sliding singly and in pairs. In keeping with its point of departure, the work evokes the roots of comedy with the Satyr: a high spirited companion of Pan/Bacchus, part human and part bestial who, in Greek mythology, roams the woodlands in search of erotic adventure.

There is an interesting physical/spiritual dialectic at play here about the nature of erotic connection. The electric joy visible in the dancer’s physical choreography and facial expressions seem to celebrate multitudinous copulation while the use of minimalist staccato music and robotic gesture underline the mechanical and even the dance macabre aspect of sexual acts.

The summary of Orpheus and Eurydice on the overhead screen seemed beside the point and risked reduction and packaging of the myth rather than enlarging upon it. Both the placement of a dancer in the audience and the device of pulling the words out of the dancer’s bodies seemed overused and conventional methods of enlarging upon the distinguished tradition (Artaud, Handke , Sarah Cane, Carolee Schneemann, etc. ) of audience confrontation. While Orpheus and Eurydice might lack some of the bite of her earlier work, this piece is worth the experience, especially for those who haven’t yet confronted the heady mix of dance, performance art , high fashion, musical experimentation and spectacle that we have come to expect from the reigning queen of the avant-garde.

Dr. Natalie Meisner
Department of English, Mount Royal College