Impressions: “Orpheus and Eurydice” by Marie Chouinard

Near the beginning of Marie Chouinard’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” a playful and slightly sinister nymph (?) swallows a golden bell; at the performance’s end the audience is delighted with a display of magical peristalsis that ends with her proudly producing another golden bell from her, well, you can guess. This is a rare ballet where rather than simply observing, the audience must reconcile themselves to the idea of dance itself. No doubt other works aspire to this, whether as an explicit aim or a peripheral goal, but I have never felt it so poignantly as in Chouinard’s production.

The ballet is constructed in every aspect to call the viewer to self-reflection, shocking them from passive observation to a visceral and yet riveting sense of participation. While watching I found myself being addressed; I felt that as a member of the audience I was validated as a necessary aspect of the performance. I was part of a circuit whereby information coded in sound and movement was passed through me and back to the dancers. Nowhere was this more powerful as when Eurydice herself climbed up into the audience in a vain attempt to escape hell. Or perhaps she was making her return? Such reflections are commonplace in a production that seeks to destroy the linear and keep us cognizant of being part of a dynamic cycle.

Take the sounds for example. Relentless and merciless are two words which come to mind, and they are not expressed in the negative sense. The score is a cacophony of horns and explosive percussions. Shrill notes are looped to build tension and when we are finally granted a moment’s calm we feel as if it is because we have reached our limit to withstand it, at which point the process is begun anew. And when there are quiet moments, the whisper of the music is like a cold bracing wind tracing our naked backs. I was reminded of the fury and majesty of the tide riding a cliff-face.

To this backing the dancers are constantly vocalizing in a manner that many critics have called “gibberish.” While it is true that there is no “grammar” that can be applied to it and nothing as trite as a “sentence” that can be gleaned from it, this “speaking” is not meaningless. In fact, it signifies nothing more and nothing less than “body music.” Or the sounds that flow from the dancers’ movements as they gyrate, pulse, spasm, leap, twist, mug, hump, and crawl from one moment to the next. One of the ballet’s central motifs has individuals gesture as if pulling words from their gaping mouths; first slowly and then building with a desperate rapidity, tones are produced that are at times like a single utterance deconstructed, and at others like the contents of an entire speech raging into one moment.

There are in fact words and sentences in the normal sense, including a bare exposition of the Orpheus myth and a statement of Chouinard’s guiding interpretation of it. The former seems obligatory because the latter, presented later and wilfully distorted by its vocalizer, is drowned out by the flurry of music and movement on stage, which ironically serve the same function. The only words to ring clear were “Don’t look back!” That this charge is significant is taken for granted given the subject matter, but it is how Chouinard reveals it to be significant that is the most interesting.

Orpheus is the tutor of the muses, and by extension, the father of all poetry in the Western Tradition. We are told that his inspired eloquence was sufficient for Hades to sanction Eurydice’s conditional salvation, and yet Orpheus is treated as merely a foil. The iconic scene of his escape happens at the early middle and is the only part of the ballet that has a deliberate sense of plot or even temporal progression. He makes his grave escape with elegant and deliberate strides, his arm offered back to Eurydice who follows in like-manner; they are both silent while all around them are figures enacting maelstroms of movement. Some prance across the stage with serpents undulating from their lips. Another references Sisyphus and his boulder by rolling a black ball to and fro. Still others have joined their bodies to form monsters of many limbs and heads. While we seek to apply these images to the traditional iconography of the myth, we are dissuaded from doing so by the lack of any overtures to capital T Tradition whatsoever, let alone linearity. While at other times we are treated with what seem like androgynous satyrs high-heel-hoofed and swinging prodigious phalli, or Dionysian orgies complete with gilded nipples, what overshadow these details is the spectacle of movement itself.

This is a world without Orpheus and his songs, a place of action without artifice or construction. The sounds here are not affected by symbolism or even the weight of thought; they are simply and profoundly the primal yawps of our bodies. Every muscular burst of vibration rushes forth like echolocation, colliding with the audience, returning to the dancer, and triggering more vibrations. The emotions of fear, lust, and exultation are presented to us raw, and they proceed from one another like atoms colliding.

Combining her sounds with the choreography of her dancers, Chouinard has created a palette of textures so forceful and engaging that we are forced to either resonate with them or reject them. Either way, we have to swallow and process every vibration thrown towards us and, having taken them in, we reciprocate by being riveted. We don’t have time for anything but feeling; thinking constitutes a halt in the process. So who can blame the audience when the beautiful Eurydice, savagely treading theatre seats in her ascent, climbs past us and we are told not to “look back”? We resist but ultimately we join Orpheus in his transgression, so undeniable are the vibrations and the sensations they elicit.

By the time that shiny bell is reproduced, we have undergone an odyssey of our own. Marie Chouinard has chosen to focus on the journey itself. In our travels hell is wherever we happen to be going; somewhere we walk towards and back away from again. Chouinard doesn’t give us any time to consider good or bad because we are meant to be moving. Nor do we have any time to consider our “liking” of the production until we have left the echoes and the flushed atmosphere of the theatre behind. Whatever reactions are produced by the re-assertion of our rationality, we are left thrilled and aching with every fibre of our bodies.



J. J. Baylon