Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Garden of Earthly Delights © Marie-Ann Paré

Compagnie Marie Chouinard (Montreal)

Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights

March 15 & 16, 2019, 8pm
Vancouver Playhouse (600 Hamilton Street)

Running Time: 75 minutes.
Speaking of Dance Pre-show Talk 7:15pm each night in the Vancouver Playhouse Upper Lobby. Moderator: Kaija Pepper (Editor, Dance International). Guest: Annie Gagnon (Rehearsal Director, Compagnie Marie Chouinard)
Post-show Social after the performance on Friday night in the Playhouse Salons.

VIEW PROGRAM NOTES.

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.

Note: This performance includes nudity.

“When it comes to mind-boggling images it’s almost impossible to out-Bosch Hieronymus Bosch. For the most part, wisely, choreographer Marie Chouinard, no slouch herself when it comes to generating mind-boggling images, accepts this graciously in her 75-minute dance homage to one of European art’s most original and puzzling painters.” – The Star

“It’s hard to summarize the experience of sitting through Chouinard’s Bosch.There’s genius in her ability to breathe life into the strangeness of sexuality as seen in Renaissance art. In doing so, she touches upon a more fundamental strangeness about the way we engage or disengage with the canonical works of our past.” – The Globe and Mail

Top photo: Compagnie Marie Chouinard. Photo: Sylvie-Ann Paré Interprètes/Dancers: Carol Prieur, Morgane Le Tiec, Valeria Galluccio, Leon Kupferschmid, Sacha Ouellette-Deguire, Paige Culley, Megan Walbaum, Lucy M. May, Scott McCabe.