DanceHouse presents the Vancouver premiere of Montreal–based Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s unparalleled Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights, on stage March 15 &16, 2019 at 8pm at the Vancouver Playhouse. In honour of the 500th anniversary of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, the acclaimed choreographer Marie Chouinard creates a living canvas, embodying the seething, teeming fecundity of Bosch’s most infamous masterpiece. Backed by Louis Dufort’s original score and brimming with Chouinard’s visual wit, the performance unfolds in quixotic tableaus of wonderment and horror that combine erotic entanglement and stunning choreography.
Since its premiere in the Netherlands in 2016, Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights has garnered rave reviews. Inspired by Bosch’s 16th century triptych currently on display in Madrid’s Prado Museum, each act of this hallucinatory three–act work embodies one of the three panels of the painting: The Garden of Delights, Hell, and Paradise. Chouinard and her ten dancers breathe life into Bosch’s writhing figures and tortured souls with movement and images as video projections draw the audience deeper into this surreal world. Populated by enormous engorged strawberries, happily naked bathers, bisected bodies, bird–headed monsters, Adam, Eve, and apparently God himself, this work can be viewed simultaneously as a celebration of the pleasures of the flesh, and a dire warning of the consequences of indulgence.
Chouinard has been wowing audiences with her powerful and inventive choreography since 1978. Her artistry is in high demand around the world; her work appears in the repertoires of major ballet companies such as The National Ballet of Canada, the São Paulo Companhia de Dança, the Göteborgs Opera, and the Ballet Gulbenkian. Moreover, since 2015, Chouinard has created new works for companies including the Martha Graham Dance Company and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. In addition to leading her own company as Executive and Artistic Director, Chouinard is the Founding Chair of Les Prix de la Danse de Montreal, an Associate Dance Artist of Canada’s National Arts Centre, and Director of Dance at the Venice Biennale. Highly decorated for her contribution to the arts, Chouinard has been the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions including the title of Officer of the Order of Canada (2007); Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France, 2009); the Chevalier of the Ordre National du Québec (2015); the Samuel de Champlain Award (France, 2014); and the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement (Canada, 2016).
Note: This performance contains nudity.
DanceHouse Presents Compagnie Marie Chouinard: Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights
Dates: March 15 &16, 2019 at 8pm
Speaking of Dance Pre–show Talk at 7:15pm each night
with Compagnie Marie Chouinard Rehearsal Director Annie Gagnon
Ticket Prices: From $35
Box Office: tickets.dancehouse.ca or call 604.801.6225
Venue: Vancouver Playhouse 600 Hamilton St, Vancouver, BC
Website: dancehouse.ca
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