Marie Chouinard, magnificent Magnificat

Clementine Schindler in Magnificat , photograph by Sylvie-Ann Paré, 2025

Marie Chouinard brings Bach into the dance with Magnificat, a mature work, vibrant with color, where sacred music becomes an inner space in motion. Driven by a complete mastery of the stage and the excellence of her performers, the choreographer affirms her art more than ever. In the second part, Mouvements, inspired by Henri Michaux, extends the evening in a fascinating—at times challenging—dialogue between drawing and gesture, before a luminous finale that awakens both bodies and eyes.

Magnificat , Marie Chouinad's new masterpiece, arrives at the perfect time, just in time for Christmas. In the program notes, the choreographer humbly states: "I simply felt that the moment had come to enter into this music and let it guide the choreography." In 2005, during the time of bODY_rEMIX / les_vARIATIONS_gOLDBERG, she didn't feel " ready to confront " Bach's music and resorted to the subterfuge of a remix by her regular collaborator, Louis Dufort. In this instance, the notes not only " evoke colors " which replace the setting and/or the framework of the action by helping to pace it, for more than half an hour, but they suggest to her what she calls " interior spaces in motion " . These "interior" movements foreshadow the play that follows, but that's another matter.

In Magnificat , movement is perpetual. The musical moments selected by the choreographer from Bach's Cantata BWV 80 , originally written in E-flat major and later in D major, flow seamlessly into one another. Approximately twenty minutes of the cantata have been shortened for the purposes of the dance. Choruses, arias, duets, and trios thus find their counterparts in the ensemble compositions , solos, pas de deux, pas de trois, and more, all of which have inspired the choreographer who, as fate would have it, bears the aptonym of the Virgin Mary. Incidentally, we care little if the musical version from the Chapel of the Royal College of Ghent, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe, is less convincing to Baroque specialists than that of John Eliot Gardiner with the Monteverdi Choir.

Marie Chouinard has complete mastery of the ballet. Not only does she, as usual, design the colorful lighting that also serves as set design, the costumes, hairstyles, accessories, and makeup, but she is also at the peak of her artistry. The dancers in her company have reached the highest technical level and deserve to be recognized: Michael Baboolal, Adrian WS Batt, Justin Calvadores, Rose Gagnol, Valeria Galluccio, Béatrice Larouche, Luigi Luna, Scott McCabe, Carol Prieur, Sophie Qin, Clémentine Schindler, Ana Van Tendeloo, and Jérôme Zerges. Among the many stunning moments was the virtuoso floor solo by the dancer-contortionist Rose Gagnol. Everything was executed to perfection. Some of the dancers, at times, open their mouths; curiously, one doesn't know if it's to breathe, catch their breath, sing, speak to oneself , or pray.

Movements , a book by Henri Michaux originally published in 1951

In the second part of the evening, Henri Michaux: Movements , a revival of a piece dating from 2011 (for the final version), 2005 (for the solo), and 1980 (for the initial idea). Regarding Henri Michaux's book Movements (1) , the choreographer explains: "These abstract drawings, these inkblots, suddenly seemed to function as a true choreographic score." These drawings from 1951 follow those of 1944 from the poet-draughtsman's Alphabet . They are not entirely abstract: some, delicate and seemingly done with a pen, represent plant forms; others, in the Chinese style, with a brush and India ink, have human figures. Or, at least, the appearance of anthropomorphic silhouettes captured in gestures. Shadow puppets, again, and splashes of color, following the art of Étienne de Silhouette (1709-1767), which preceded/foreshadowed Tachisme. The beautiful Kandinsky exhibition at the Philharmonie (2) shows, following the one at the Centre Pompidou in 2011-2012, "Dancing His Life," the schematic drawings inspired by Grete Palucca's poses in 1926 (3) . Here, the approach is reversed: it is the dance that mimics the drawing.

Not all the drawings, in fact: half of those in the book, if we counted correctly—32 pages out of 64. Which isn't bad, as the systematic (tautological) nature of the approach eventually bored the audience, including us. Despite the performance of the dancers, men and women, promoted to choreographers with the burden or responsibility that falls upon them, not only to represent/reproduce movements, initially improvised, but, moreover, to animate them. Were these meidosems , in fact, signs? Michaux wondered: " They were gestures, inner gestures, those for which we have no limbs but desires for limbs, tensions, impulses . " Despite Louis Dufort's best efforts with his well-crafted electronic composition, monotony threatens after a while. Fortunately, the finale (foreshadowed by the false lighting tests in the prologue) turns the tables. Not that the signs become swans again, but, the white page turning black, the photons of the stroboscope replace the pigments and ward off torpor, rescue the dance, shake the audience.

Nicolas Villodre

• Magnificat (creation) and Henri Michaux: Mouvements (revival), choreographies by Marie Chouinard, were presented from December 10 to 13, 2025 at the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt in Paris.

NOTES

(1). Mouvements , a book by Henri Michaux published by Gallimard in the early 1950s, combines a long poem and a series of ink drawings to explore the relationship between gesture, sign, and inner movement. The work was initially published in 1951–1952 in Gallimard's "Le Point du Jour" collection, as a quarto paperback with an illustrated cover. This was an original edition limited to just over 1,300 numbered copies, now sought after on the rare book market. The book was subsequently reissued, notably in art book formats and as part of collections such as Face aux serrures or later Gallimard volumes. Mouvements comprises a poem, 64 black-on-white drawings, and an afterword in which Michaux reflects on his practice of the graphic sign. The cover reverses this arrangement, with white lines on a black background, emphasizing the interplay of inversion, contrast, and tension at the heart of the project. The drawings follow one another page after page, like a series of invented ideograms, somewhere between writing, figures in motion, and abstract choreography. In the afterword, Michaux insists that the drawings came before the words, like a "new language" that freed him from the weight of words. He conceives of these signs as the trace of rapid, almost automatic gestures, seeking to capture inner movements, impulses, and tensions that overflow the bounds of linguistic description.

(2). Kandinsky, the Music of Colors exhibition , until February 1, 2026, at the Philharmonie de Paris. https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/fr/activite/exposition/28824-kandinsky

(3) Grete (Gret) Palucca, born Margarethe Paluka, is a major figure in German modern dance, as a performer, choreographer, and teacher. Active throughout the 20th century, she is best known for her dance school in Dresden and for her contribution to expressive dance in Europe. Of Jewish descent on her father's side, she initially trained in classical ballet before turning to modern and expressive dance. She died in Dresden in 1993, after more than seven decades of artistic and teaching career.

Pictured here: Summer holidays in Sylt: Gret Palucca loved this North Sea island, where she stayed regularly, especially in the interwar period... Even today, the fishing boat "Gret Palucca" is moored in the port of List.

© picture alliance/VisualEyze/Unit

Between 1914 and 1916, Palucca studied ballet in Dresden before attending a girls' school and then Mary Wigman's dance school in the early 1920s. She joined Wigman's company and contributed to the dissemination of German Expressionist dance before breaking away to develop her own choreographic language. From this early period, she distinguished herself with explosive leaps and joyful gestures that defied academic conventions. In 1925, she opened her own dance school in Dresden, soon followed by branches in Berlin and Stuttgart, which became key centers for modern dance in Germany. Through her marriage to Friedrich Bienert, she became close to the artists of the Bauhaus and attracted the attention of figures such as Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, who saw in her dances a choreographic equivalent of their formal explorations. The Palucca School remains today one of the major legacies of his educational work.

Confrontation with Nazism and the GDR. In 1936, Palucca danced a remarkable solo at the Berlin Olympics, but, due to her Jewish heritage, her schools were closed by the Nazi authorities in 1939, and she was no longer allowed to teach, although she could still perform on stage. After the destruction of Dresden in 1945, she managed to reopen her school, which was subsequently nationalized and integrated into the cultural system of the German Democratic Republic, where the pedagogy of Russian-style ballet dominated. Despite pressure to transform her school into a strictly Soviet institution, she championed modern dance and played a role in official bodies, notably within the GDR Academy of Arts.

Palucca embodies an expressive dance centered on freedom of movement, improvisation, and a jubilant energy, often described through her grand leaps and radiant stage presence. Her personality inspired numerous photographers—notably Charlotte Rudolph—and her images continue to circulate, culminating in recent exhibitions such as "The New Woman Behind the Camera" and "Women in Abstraction," which situate her within the history of modern dance. She received numerous awards in East Germany and, after reunification, in West Germany, and her Dresden school continues to perpetuate her pedagogical and artistic legacy to this day.

BONUS

Marie Chouinard at the microphone of Radio Canada, in 2021. Photo Hamza Abouelouafaa / Radio-Canada

Marie Chouinard is a major choreographer on the contemporary scene, known for her radical approach where the body becomes a territory of experimentation, desire, and metamorphosis. Founder of Compagnie Marie Chouinard in Montreal in 1990, she now shines on major international stages.

Born in Quebec City in 1955, she rose to prominence in the late 1970s with a series of solos in which she explored the raw power of the body, blurring the lines between performance, trance, and ritual. For over a decade, she performed alone on stage, forging an extreme physical vocabulary of breaths, grunts, spasms, and imbalances, grounding dance in the very essence of animality and desire. In 1990, she founded Compagnie Marie Chouinard in Montreal, adapting this solitary exploration to a group setting and creating works that have profoundly influenced the contemporary imagination.

Her choreographies—from Marie Chien Noir to L'Après-midi d'un faune and Henri Michaux: Mouvements —engage in dialogue with literature, visual arts, and both classical and rock music, while simultaneously challenging representations of gender and sexuality. Chouinard treats bodies as unstable landscapes: distorted mouths, splayed fingers, twisted spines, precarious supports. She often incorporates lighting devices and technologies, transforming the stage into a laboratory where ancient mythologies, futuristic fantasies, and archaic impulses are reenacted.

A leading figure in Canadian dance, an artist associated with the biggest festivals, Marie Chouinard continues to forge a unique path: a dance of excess, jubilation and unease, which makes the spectator waver between fascination and discomfort, and reminds us that the body remains a field of forces, enigmas and resistances.

• Marie Chouinard company website: https://www.mariechouinard.com

"Marie Chouinard, art as celebration", program of the Théâtre de la Ville (below in PDF)

Chouinard art comme célébration.pdf

Download PDF • 1.03MB

Marie Chouinard, a brief interview

(conversation with Paul-André Fortier in Ottawa in June 2016)

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