The Golden Mean: an enchanted world

Marie Chouinard is not your average choreographer.  She’s not even your average excellent choreographer.  She’s mind-blowing, which is why if you could only see one dance show this season it should be The Golden Mean (Le Moyen d’Or), except that you can’t see it in Vancouver anymore because its Vancouver run was a mere two nights.  

I used to live in the same neighbourhood in Montréal as Marie Chouinard and I remember seeing her once, floating down the street carrying a fistful of helium balloons; she made me think of a character out of a storybook – absolutely in her own enthralling world, buoyed by a flight of fancy that the rest of us couldn’t even see.  And that is Marie Chouinard.  She inhabits a world so unique, so rich with image and symbol and layer upon layer of meaning and she manages to bring all of this to the stage in the form of choreography that is taught, clever, beautiful, sometimes dark and often hilarious.  

The Golden Mean started off innocently enough with two dancers sheathed in cocoons of golden-coloured gauze-like material; slowly they undulated their way out and were eventually joined by a full ensemble of 10 other dancers who all lay on their backs, pointing their toes rapidly and repeatedly  while making crying noises.  And already I felt myself being pulled in to the antechamber of Chouinard’s unpredictable and absurd world.  Things quickly got more absurd when the dancers left the stage and re-entered all of them wearing –  believe it or not – slightly larger than life Stephen Harper masks.  At first there was just one dancer moving around stage in prime ministerial headgear, which was already quite a spectacle, but eventually the Harper head became ubiquitous and there were a dozen or so dancing prime ministers, bobbing their heads, and creating a scene that could only be called surreal, absurd and brilliant in its hilarity.  It wasn’t just the masks that were such a laugh, but the choreography itself somehow suggested comedy, or even parody without ever compromising the integrity of the dance.

Leaving politics behind, the dancers left the stage and re-emerged in golden wigs and Andy Warhol-esque glasses. First they were a choir with one member whose demented contribution makes the loveliness of the song turn bizarre, next they lay on the floor laughing and finally they were momentarily werewolves howling into the audience.  At this point in the show I had completely entered the entrancing and absolutely dream-like world of Marie Chouinard.  Her dancers become creatures whose vocalizations and movements seem like a highly evolved language that is so unfamiliar, and so brilliantly original that they seem to have come directly from another planet.  Yet, Chouinard’s work is strangely appealing because, in spite of the extreme risks that it takes, it deals so intelligently with certain themes that are universal and completely recognizable.

The section after the howling wolves included a duet between a male and female dancer (though they were costumed such that gender differences were, at times, hard to distinguish).  The duo was clearly living every aspect of a relationship; there were agonized screams and a movement vocabulary that was disturbing in its intense intimation of desperation and its enactment of a kind of love or hate scenario.  I’m not sure if everyone felt it, but at this moment, I thought there was palpable discomfort in the audience, and I admire Chouinard’s courage for pushing her choreography so far.  Perhaps what was most notable about this moment in the dance is that even though it was so uncomfortable, it remained beautifully crafted and didn't devolve into a crass or undeveloped movement vocabulary.  Chouinard’s deft ability to handle the full spectrum of human emotion while remaining firmly grounded in her own original, detailed and beautiful choreography is one of her most significant strengths.  

There were plenty of other moments in the show that were equally provocative and symbolically loaded, and there were also plenty of other moments that took the audience deeper and deeper into the world of the comedic and the absurd.  The dancers got to enter and re-enter the stage a number of times with a series of different masks and each one opened up a whole new avenue of expression for the ensemble.  Perhaps most affecting were the masks of men and women who must have been in their 70s or more, all of them with grey hair.  All but one of the dancers entered the stage masked this way, together they made their way up the ramp part of the stage that jutted out from the main stage, imitating a catwalk and they huddled together facing the stage while the lone dancer moved about in front of them.  What was effective about this was that their faces were reflected back to the audience (and to the dancers) through the use of five screens that projected live video at various times throughout the show.  There was something about the stillness and the closeness of these masked characters, who looked for all the world like a wise group of grandparents and not at all like contemporary dancers, that I found so moving.  It was as though by affixing older faces to such young, fit bodies, and by turning these dancers into part of the audience, Chouinard referred to all our mortality, allowing each of us to imagine our aged selves, no longer a performer but a watcher of the solo dancer that remained on stage.  

In the final section, one dancer and then later another emerged wearing a mask that was actually four masks; one face in each direction so that no matter which way the dancers looked they were looking right at the audience.  The disorientation of this lingers with me as do all of the possible meanings of this creation.  At one point, one of the four-faced dancers was being ardently embraced and kissed by a male dancer, and it looked as though she was at once passionately kissing him back and ignoring him by staring at the audience, and the questions about identity and which parts of our identity are shown and which parts are hidden were abundant and immediate.  While this was going on, the rest of the dancers came out, nude and each one wearing the mask of a baby.  Once again, Chouinard’s boldness and fearlessness allowed her dancers to have tremendous power to evoke multiple meanings while maintaining a standard of dance and choreography that is some of the best I’ve seen.

It’s not merely her gimmicks that make Marie Chouinard the jewel in the choreographic crown; it’s her intelligence.  She creates work that draws her viewers into an enchanted world where every gesture is a question, a symbol, a metaphor in the making.  And while her choreography is so dense with meaning, it is also technically gorgeous, and demanding, her dancers amongst the most trained and talented in this country.  And, somehow she manages to be profound, beautiful and – amazingly – hilariously entertaining.  Stepping into Chouinard’s world for a few hours is never, ever enough.