rEMIXing a sense of dance

Before Marie Chouinard started creating her new choreography, she had an idea. She wanted to explore a new architecture for the body.

So on her first day in the studio, Chouinard started playing. She put a dancer in ballet pointe shoes and crutches and waited to see what would happen. She also challenged the dancers with other prosthetic devices such as harnesses and ropes.

"It was a playground," Chouinard said.

"How can we work? How can we dance? How do we move through space? It was a playground trying all those props: What if we're into the harnesses and wearing pointe shoes on the feet? What if one is barefoot and one in pointe shoes? It was really, really playful."

Chouinard put her dancers in pointe shoes not as a homage to ballet or to refer to its influence on western dance. She did it simply because she sees pointe shoes as extensions of the body.

"The pointe shoe is not any more a ballet shoe -- it is another crutch, another prosthesis," she said in a phone interview from her new $2.6- million dance studio in Montreal.

"They are devices that we can add to the body to create a different way to move through space."

Chouinard's playful exploration resulted in bODY_rEMIX, a full-length dance in two acts that had its premiere at the 2005 Venice Biennale's International Festival of Dance.

Since then, Chouinard's work for 10 dancers has been performed around the world. On Friday and Saturday, Compagnie Marie Chouinard performs bODY_rEMIX at The Playhouse. It is a presentation of Dancing on the Edge Festival and DanceHouse, new contemporary dance subscription series.

Vancouver was supposed to get bODY_rEMIX two years ago for Dancing on the Edge. But at the time, The Playhouse was under renovations and the Centennial Theatre couldn't guarantee that its ceiling was strong enough to hold dancers swinging in harnesses. Instead, the company performed Prelude a L'apres-midi d'un Faune and Le Sacre du printemps.

On one level, the prosthetic devices in bODY_rEMIX could been seen as a metaphor for how technology both limits and liberates humanity.

But Chouinard said she sees her work more as a metaphor for how humans create solutions to whatever problems they face.

"If you have one pointe shoe, one bare foot and one crutch, you will manage to move. It could be a metaphor that in every human society, there is always a frame. In that frame, how do we find freedom?" said Chouinard, one of the country's leading choreographers.

"Yes, this is our duty as human beings. We are always finding our freedom in specific frames."

Chouinard said that from the start, she imagined the music accompanying her new work would be J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations, a musical work that develops 30 variations on one aria, because it has a similar construction to bODY_rEMIX.

Chouinard has chosen Glenn Gould's recording of the Goldberg Variations, which is itself a compilation of several takes. As well, the soundtrack includes Louis Dufort's Variations on the Variations and extracts of Gould humming, as he often did during his performances.

Chouinard's playfulness extends to the unusual typography she's chosen for the work's title with its reversal of capitals and lower cases and the addition of underlines and a backslash to link the words.

"Why not?" Chouinard said and then laughed when asked why she did that.

"It's fun. Already there, you have a little choreography. A little reorganization of signs. Wherever we go around the world, they're always respecting this code of letters."