Crystal Pite, in addition to going out on tour with her company Kidd Pivot this fall, recently created her first piece for the Nederlands Dans Theater. Check out this YouTube video to see rehearsal footage as well as interviews with Crystal and NDT’s artistic director, Anders Hellström.

The dancers of NDT perform Crystal’s choreography with a singular precision and passion that is perhaps matched only by the crew that Crystal cherry picked to appear in Lost Action. Here at OtB we’re getting excited their collective background, which includes choreographers and companies such as Holy Body Tattoo, Zvi Gotheiner, Stephen Petronio, Bill T. Jones, NDT2, Frankfurt Ballet, Hino Akira, La La La Human Steps and Joven Guardia Ballet of Havana.

More info on Lost Action, an interview with Crystal and details on how to sign up for her master class in Seattle all located here.

Here’s our new corner kiosk, thanks to an amazing program called the Rasterbator. Don’t miss Gisele Vienne and Dennis Cooper’s JERK here at OtB next week. There are still tickets available for the Weds and Sun night performances.

Have a listen as Lane, our artistic director, talks with Gisele about JERK:
Click here to listen [mp3]

Check out these press reviews for Orpheus and Eurydice:

Seattle Times – Dance Review | Chouinard gives “Orpheus and Eurydice” a provocative twist

Seattle PI – Chouinard’s visual power is unfailing

Cross Cut – Marie Chouinard, a very distinctive voice in dance

Welcome to our review blog for Orpheus and Eurydice. Read our patron reviews, click on the Comments button to read the comments of others and post your own thoughts.

Marie Chouinard creates universes that unto themselves.  When I first saw the company perform many years ago, I was struck by the completeness of her vision, by the absolute other reality she created.  In the years when I worked with Marie as an “interprete,” I learned that that otherworldliness is not a façade.

When I first saw Marie’s Le Sacre du Printemps, I knew that I had been challenged.  Marie’s Sacre is a masterpiece and I never grew tired of performing this work.  It changed me as her work changes anyone who comes into contact with it.  The power in Marie’s work flows from the demands she makes of her dancers.  There is little “choreography” in her work.  A gesture or a few shapes strung together constitutes her set material, but as we saw in Orpheus and Eurydice, her dancers are working very hard.  Marie demands a level of commitment from her dancers that is unlike any other choreographer.  Working a-rhythmically with the spine and voice, her dancers generate a vocabulary that is at once both spontaneous and uniquely Marie.  As a performer, this was a most gratifying gift.  Performing Marie’s work I felt like a an artist for the first time although I had a long impressive list by the time I moved to Montreal.  clMarie created a company of solo performance artists, like herself.

Orpheus and Eurydice does look familiar to me at moments.  I recognize motifs, makeup, and manipulations from other works.  For the Marie Chouinard “virgin,” I won’t point them out but will leave you with the unnecessary notion that this new work is closely in line with her others. What I will also share is that even though she has not reinvented the wheel this time, she continues to hold open a unique doorway to an energetic, kinesthetic power that is found in all of her work.

When Marie began creating work, her colleagues begged her to call it dance.  She was not disposed to put her unique creations in any category, but by placing herself within the world of dance, she has changed the genre.  These visions seem to reflect our own reality with daring questions like:  Why are you so closed down?  Why are you so uptight?  What’s wrong with being downright horny?

As a performer, leaving Marie was difficult.  I loved the fully empowered, openness that she, and she alone, demanded of me.  I also missed creating the catalytic energy her work unleashed into the world.  I’m so thankful to have basked in her presence once again at OtB this weekend.

-Louis Gervais

Something of a sexual assault on the senses, Marie Chouinard’s Orpheus and Eurydice is a piece of primitive, gut wrenching emotion. There’s a heavy emphasis on sexuality. Men and women are both naked from the waist up throughout apart from gold pasties covering their nipples, and men stalk about from time to time in platform shoes with six inch heels, evoking more from this clearly mythological performance. An explicit production with a substantial amount of on-stage copulation. And one with a single moment I’d like to isolate from the entire production. A moment that made me weep with sadness like no other I’ve experienced in dance. A moment where I felt like a silent witness to a violent act.

This moment comes nearly three-quarters of the way through the production. Two women are left on the stage, one with mouth agape. Not just open, but as wide open as the body allows. The other begins
to motion as though she is removing something from deep inside of the silent woman’s body. Slowly a voice emerges, a voice without meaning, which for this production is par for the course. In a circus like
act, the woman continues to pull the voice, like a rope stuck way down inside the belly; out it comes. The noises that emerge are like hushed shouts of pain and the woman’s body is thrown around the
stage. As the puller pulls the other gets pulled. Up, down, across the stage, up stage, down stage. And no end is apparent to her need to expel this noise. With near boredom, the tugger stops leaving the
woman alone on the stage, once again silent. Once again agape. And then the excruciatingly violent sex acts begin again. Other dancers thrust each other violently across the stage and our lone woman
stands silent, agape, caught in a maelstrom of orgiastic ecstasy. Silent, still, nearly smothered by the overwhelming presence of carnal lust. Swallowed up, unable to scream or shout, just silent, bare, and like the audience a mortified voyeur to a fierce, rough, rugged, wild, raging, hormonal spectacle encompassing our sights. I cry. I weep, and its over.

- Adam Sekuler

Extraordinary performance by Compagnie Marie Chouinard doing Orpheus & Eurydice, starting from the story most people know about the poet charming his way down to the underworld to bring back his lost love and losing her when he looked back. And, what most people don’t know about Eurydice and how she died, and what happened to Orpheus afterward. All this and much, much more! Revelry, lyric, adoration, insanity, terror, grief. Sexy, earthy, silly fun and some touching moments, too. Fabulous dancing, vocabulary of balletic theatrical martial artsy lyrical modern movement. Words and music one with the dance. Fabulous facial choreography, best I’ve seen in a long time. Some pretty good jokes. Lightly clad bodies doing extraordinary shifting images and shapes, sometimes sculptural, the stage a canvas where the action is always beautifully composed. A wonderful pas de deux where two dancers make a lyre. There might be dancers as Eurydice or Orpheus or ten of them, or as a tree nymph, or Cerebus or dancers as such. Bacchanalia extraordinaire. A fascinating piece of dance theater.

Afterward, I thought, look! Don’t look back! You can’t not know how to not look back. You can’t not look back, no how. All we know of each other and ourselves is what we know of each other and ourselves, from before. And then it’s gone. Can anyone sing of what is and not what was? Only without meaning anything, just a melody to enchant a lover or a demon or the very stones we walk on or for mindless sex. Like waves breaking on some shore. Like wind whispering through leaves. The tree needs roots going down underground to wave in the wind. Uprooted it dies. But, you can’t make a lyre without killing trees. So sweetest songs mourn loss. So we rock on. Thus, I think of Compagnie Marie Chouinard as an exhibit from the modern museum of ancient art. Don’t miss it!

– Ken

What cosmic forces are drawing artists to Orpheus and Eurydice these days?

Are we all feeling pulled toward the underworld of late? Is it the economy?

Whatever the reason, we’re getting a lot of O & E around here, which is fine by me. I recently saw Sarah Ruhl’s take on the ancient Greek myth, “Eurydice,” at ACT Theatre, which was modernized in a lovely way–gorgeously staged, funny and quite moving. I missed Seattle Dance Project’s companion dance performance, “Orpheus,” but I’m told it too gave the tale a modern spin (particularly via the soundtrack), while retaining the central storyline: boy follows girl into the underworld to drag her back among the living, then botches it just as he’s about to cross the finish line by looking back at her.

Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s version is more hellbent on shock and awe than the abovementioned pieces (starting with the gold pasties both male and female performers wear throughout). Nude satyr-esque men sport sky-high mule heels and large (VERY LARGE!) phalluses (phalli?). Other nearly nude humans gyrate spastically and emit horrible grunts, groans and retching noises.

There is a lot of thrusty simulated sex–much of it accomplished with big rah-rah cheerleader grins (quite effective in rendering the actions completely un-sexy).

Much of this darkly funny pageantry works–it is, after all, the underworld, and the Greeks were seriously into raunch. But a lot of it goes on too long and would have been much more effective in short glimpses, such as when the company curls up like stones, moved to moaning by Orpheus’s soulful poetry, or the brief, witty section in which the underworldians engage in a NASCAR-style “race out of hell.” The announcer reminds, “Not that complicated, just don’t look back,” yet none of them can resist.

But here I must confess that I’m tired of performers crawling around in the audience. Enough! As soon as poor, doomed Eurydice took her footing on the backs of the front row seats I thought, oh no, we’ve got another crawler. We (granted, “we” being those of us who frequent dance theater shows) have seen this gimmick before. And sometimes it’s just as effective to leave that fourth wall firmly standing.

I found the smaller moments in the piece the most affecting. The snakes–a cool effect in which serpents seemed to slither suspended from the performers’ mouths. The jingling golden bells, which served both as choking hazard and liberator. And the awful way the performers held their mouths agape–as if both unknowing and all-knowing. And of course, the few sequences acknowledging the truly wrenching part of the myth–the moment that Orpheus looks back (no, Orpheus, no!) and loses his beloved forever. As the lovers fall away slowly from each other it becomes instantly clear why this old story retains its relevance.

-Brangien Davis

Companie Marie Chouinard’s ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ treats it’s audience to an orgiastic feast for the senses. The company performs with such visceral intensity that their movements transform into sound, or perhaps they are trying so hard to speak that their voices pull their bodies into movement. I though of Martha Graham’s work while watching the company, not only because of the bound movement quality and emotional initiation of the movements, but also because the myth was used as a symbolic anchor for the evening rather than as a narrative score. The archetypes of Orpheus, Eurydice and inhabitants of the underworld, shift from historic characters to aspects of the audience’s selves through Chouinard’s ability to isolate emotional intensities and then transpose them onto the company of dancers as a whole. This abstraction and multiplication of the sensations in the myth immersed the audience in the play of love, loss, temptation, lust and failure that ricochet about in the story. At one point, “Eurydice” climbs from the stage out into the audience and as she passes the first few rows of seats, performers from the stage implore the audience to not look back. As the dancer continues through the house, climbing over chairs and people, pausing occasionally to stand on her head, continuously making sounds that ask for attention, the audience in the front of the house is faced with the same impossible dilemma that caught Orpheus. From my seat in the back of the house, I watched as many of then succumbed to temptation and turned around to see what the woman was doing. This treatment of the myth gave it life in the present moment as an embodiment of aspects of all people’s psyches. The men and women in the company all performed with outstanding dedication to the work. Brava to all of the artists for their bravery, and to On the Boards for bringing such a fantastic and daring performance to Seattle!

-Catherine Cabeen