DanceHouse Presents Internationally Lauded Compagnie Marie Chouinard in Tribute to Hieronymus Bosch

World–renowned choreographic visionary offers a spectacle  of phantasmagoria inspired by Dutch artist’s iconoclastic painting

DanceHouse presents the Vancouver premiere of Montreal–based Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s unparalleled Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights, on stage March 15 &16, 2019 at 8pm at the Vancouver Playhouse. In honour of the 500th anniversary of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, the acclaimed choreographer Marie Chouinard creates a living canvas, embodying the seething, teeming fecundity of Bosch’s most infamous masterpiece. Backed by Louis Dufort’s original score and brimming with Chouinard’s visual wit, the performance unfolds in quixotic tableaus of wonderment and horror that combine erotic entanglement and stunning choreography.

“We are thrilled to welcome audience favourite Compagnie Marie Chouinard to the DanceHouse stage for their third appearance,” says Jim Smith, Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse. “Chouinard’s deep respect for the human body and its expressive potential is inspiring and thought-provoking. She consistently operates at the vanguard of her field, shattering boundaries with each of her astonishingly original and challenging works. When describing the creative process behind Hieronymus Bosch, Chouinard has expressed the joy she felt in paying homage to a master artist — I have no doubt audiences will be in awe of this exquisite creation.”

Since its premiere in the Netherlands in 2016, Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights has garnered rave reviews. Vienna’s Tanzchrift called it “Magnificent, delightful… startlingly well performed,” while France’s Le Monde proclaimed “Marie Chouinard transposes Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights with raw gusto… the bodies are free, delightfully engaged in this fearless dance.” Inspired by Bosch’s 16th century triptych currently on display in Madrid’s Prado Museum, each act of this hallucinatory three–act work embodies one of the three panels of the painting: The Garden of Delights, Hell, and Paradise. Chouinard and her ten dancers breathe life into Bosch’s writhing figures and tortured souls with movement and images as video projections draw the audience deeper into this surreal world. Populated by enormous engorged strawberries, happily naked bathers, bisected bodies, bird–headed monsters, Adam, Eve, and apparently God himself, this work can be viewed simultaneously as a celebration of the pleasures of the flesh, and a dire warning of the consequences of indulgence.

Hailed as “Canadian dance’s premiere provocateur,” (The Georgia Straight), Chouinard has been wowing audiences with her powerful and inventive choreography since 1978. Her artistry is in high demand around the world; her work appears in the repertoires of major ballet companies such as The National Ballet of Canada, the São Paulo Companhia de Dança, the Göteborgs Opera, and the Ballet Gulbenkian. Moreover, since 2015, Chouinard has created new works for companies including the Martha Graham Dance Company and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. In addition to leading her own company as Executive and Artistic Director, Chouinard is the Founding Chair of Les Prix de la Danse de Montreal, an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre, and Director of Dance at the Venice Biennale. Highly decorated for her contribution to the arts, Chouinard has been the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions including the title of Officer of the Order of Canada (2007); Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France, 2009); the Chevalier of the Ordre National du Québec (2015); the Samuel de Champlain Award (France, 2014); and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement (Canada, 2016).

Since founding her company in 1990, Compagnie Marie Chouinard has enjoyed a lauded international reputation, performing the world over and co-producing works with such renowned partners as the Venice Biennale, the ImPulsTanz International Dance Festival (Vienna), the Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), the Fondazione Musica Per Roma (Rome), Place des Arts (Montreal), Festival TransAmériques (Montreal), and the National Arts Centre (Ottawa). Praised for their technique, versatility, and performance skills, the ten permanent dancers of the company, trained in different somatic approaches, bring Chouinard’s iconic creations to life on stage.

Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch draftsman and painter from Brabant working in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. His vibrant colours and heavy impasto brushstrokes were deployed in service of visual cautionary tales, heavily filtered through his fertile imagination. His fantastical creations stand out against his Northern Renaissance peers, whose smoothly effaced style was applied to historical tableaus, scenes from everyday life, and didactic religious topics. Modern art historians cite Bosch, with his symbolic imagery and nightmarish figures, as an important influence in the Surrealist movement of the 20th century.

Note: This performance contains nudity.

For tickets and further information, visit: dancehouse.ca

LISTING INFORMATION	DanceHouse Presents Compagnie Marie Chouinard: Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights
Dates:	March 15 &16, 2019 at 8pm Speaking of Dance Pre–show Talk at 7:15pm each night with Compagnie Marie Chouinard Rehearsal Director Annie Gagnon
Ticket Prices:	From $35
Box Office:	tickets.dancehouse.ca or call 604.801.6225
Venue:	Vancouver Playhouse 600 Hamilton St, Vancouver, BC
Website:	dancehouse.ca

Feature image: Interprètes/Dancers : Leon Kupferschmid, Carol Prieur, Morgane Le Tiec, Valeria Galluccio, Paige Culley, Sacha Ouellette-Deguire, Megan Walbaum, Lucy M. May

Photo : Nicolas Ruel

Media release and images provided by Sarah Ghosh, Murray Paterson Marketing Group.

 

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