Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights

In honour of the 500th anniversary of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, choreographer Marie Chouinard creates a living canvas, embodying the seething, heaving fecundity of Bosch’s most infamous masterpiece.

Working from the painting itself, Chouinard and her dancers collected a vocabulary of positions, culled from the hallucinatory, surrealist details – enormous engorged strawberries, happily naked bathers, bisected bodies, bird-headed monsters, Adam, Eve, and apparently God himself – all contained in three separate narrative panels. Is it a prelapsarian vision of voluptuous delights, or a dire warning of imminent fall from grace?

Backed by an original score by Louis Dufort, and brimming with Chouinard’s visual wit, the performance unfolds in quixotic tableaus of wonderment and horror that combine erotic entanglement, stunning choreography and painterly beauty to create an experience of near-Paradisiacal ravishment.