Critical Perspective of Compagnie Marie Chouinard's Orpheus and Eurydice by Michael Thomas Taylor

What we got in last night’s performance of Orpheus and Eurydice was eros on stage: as in last year’s revival of Chouinard’s Rite of Spring, the company explores the primordial drives and energies of myth as the foundation of modern theatre. But this new theme is more deliberately artistic: Orpheus marks not only one of the most essential myths of poetic creation and loss but also, with Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), the birth of opera. It is telling that this opera was rediscovered and performed in 1905, as part of the same explosion of artistic energy that produced the avant-garde primitivism of Rite of Spring. The smashing of the classical forms that had come to define the rituals of European theatre went hand in hand with the canonization of Orpheus as the figure through which theatre imagines its origins.

Yet in re-telling this story Chouinard loses Orpheus much the way Orpheus loses Eurydice when he looks back. The piece leaves it open as to whether the singer looks back out of fear, audacity, or sheer desire; and at one point it makes us, the audience, into Orpheus, rendering Eurydice—her loss and the lament it provokes—an object of our desires, too. Mouths become one enduring sign for this loss and the pain of this lament: mouths gaping open, making ghoulish and senseless sounds; offering entryways and exits for ingestion and reanimation and for passage to the sexual organs, and exposing the dancers’ bodies to the torture of being pulled inside out. These openings cut a void through the center of the piece’s highly stylized vocabulary of carnivalesque and ecstatic gestures and movements, and above all, through the dancers’ faces, which display an amazing gamut of extreme expressions. The effect is both fierce and silly, and what appears bestial and demonic can turn quickly into vaudeville or magicians’ tricks. This is a work that knows it has put a myth on stage, and that all stages have barkers, however high or serious the art. For Chouinard, the Orphic myth thereby becomes a prism to articulate the desires set free when modern dance ritualizes and formalizes essential, everyday movements of the body, and to register the displacement and spectacle—the shared experience of the body—that result when these movements become theatre.

Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de