Marie Chouinard: bODY_rEMIX gOLDBERG

Marie Chouinard

Quebec choreographer Marie Chouinard’s 2005 evening length bODY_rEMIX/ gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS features dancers with a variety of prosthetic apparatus: cane, walker, forearm crutches, and… pointe shoes. No doubt there are many perspectives on this work: cyborg, fetish, ableness, and more, yet for me it is a dance about dance. In bODY_rEMIX her company dances on pointe… they dance barefoot… and they also dance with one foot in a toe shoe and the other barefoot. This act alone is a simple yet powerful shattering of a pervasive trope. That one either dances on pointe or barefoot is an “obvious” statement. It is a cultural norm so obvious it isn’t really a norm, or never stated as such. It’s a little bit like having a whole culture moving together on a giant cultural conveyor belt so that we all think we’re stationary when we’re actually just focused too narrowly to see that we’re all, always in motion.

bODY_rEMIX

Presented in the context of so many other prosthetic devices the pointe shoe takes a less romanticized (if more fetishized) place as a modification to the human body. A cyborg “enhancement.” Gracie Kendal is thinner than Kristine Schomaker. Beyonce in 16cm heels has a very different body image and presence than Beyonce barefoot. A dancer in toe shoes can, with years of training, do the impossible: dance on her toes. Is this an angelic act? Or a bondage act? Or, like The Oracle at Delphi, does she have one foot in the pain of this reality, and another in the flight of a different reality. A hacker hunched over a flat-screen creating visual poetry in cybernetic space.

I was able to watch the full, evening-length work in high-quality video on the remarkable website Balletoman.com. And in turn, I surfed my way (and, uh, the bulk of the day) over to Balletoman.com because of a LinkedIN discussion. Steeve Austin asked,

What about a short film where the actors don’t act but dance? Can dance tell a story like words or acting can?

and Ruby isla Cera Marle replied,

I think you only have to look at something like Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man which tells the story of jealousy and murder all through the medium of dance. I think that dance film would always need music to help convey a story/emotion.

I’d never seen Bourne’s The Car Man (also a compelling work) which is how I wound up surfing over to Balletoman.com to watch it, along with bODY_rEMIX/ gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS. So if you actually have stuff to get done, be sure to avoid Balletoman.com! However if you’ve got a little time, poke through their impressive library – it’s a wonderful resource!