MAGNIFICAT & HENRI MICHAUX: MOUVEMENTS

Opening Ceremony of the 36th euro-scene Leipzig before the performance in Foyer 1, featuring:

Athena Lucie Assamba – Performance
Dr Skadi Jennicke – Mayor and Deputy Mayor for Culture of the City of Leipzig
Geneviève Rolland – Québec Delegate General for Germany, Austria and Switzerland
Aline Fiedler – Head of the Arts and Culture Department, SMKT Saxony

Marie Chouinard was born in Quebec. At the age of 16, she spent four months alone in Percé, a seaside village in the Gaspé Peninsula known for its iconic rock formation—an experience that would transform her life.

As a choreographer, she traveled the world as a solo performer for 12 years before founding the COMPAGNIE MARIE CHOUINARD in 1990. Her works, radical and deeply resonant, with a singular signature, have stood the test of time and are part of the repertoires of major international ballet companies.

She is also a director (films, apps, virtual reality works), an author (Zéro Douze, Chantiers des extases), and a visual artist (photography, drawings, installations, performance). She creates choreographic works for site-specific installations, for the screen, and in real-time for the web.

She was named an Officière des Arts et des Lettres in France, is a Bessie Award recipient in New York, and has a star on the Walk of Fame in Sibiu, Romania. She has received some thirty of the most prestigious awards and honors.

In 2011, she founded the Prix de la Danse de Montréal, and from 2017 to 2020, she served as Director of Dance at the Venice Biennale. Marie Chouinard is currently preparing a solo exhibition of her visual and performance works (2027).

Can you tell us about the origins of MAGNIFICAT? What inspired you to choreograph Bach’s Magnificat?

Bach has been part of my life for many years. In 2005, with bODY_rEMIX/lesvARIATIONS gOLDBERG, I had already approached the Goldberg Variations, though in the form of a remix – as if I had not yet been ready to confront his music in its pure form. With Magnificat, it was hearing this work again, hearing it right down to the cells of my body, that provided the decisive impulse. The Magnificat moved me through its intelligence, its emotional power and the way Bach gives form to the impulse of the Annunciation. I am not religious, but I recognise the power of this music, this joy of being permeated by something greater than ourselves. I simply felt that the time had come to immerse myself in this music and let it guide the choreography.

How did Bach’s music influence the choreographic process?

I have a way of listening in which sounds evoke colours, physical sensations and inner spaces in motion. These sensory intuitions, these impetuous and sudden impulses, are what set the work in motion. At the heart of the process is the encounter between the way I listen and the form that gradually begins to emerge. Choreography then becomes a way of making visible what the music triggers in me. HENRI MICHAUX : MOUVEMENTS was created in 2011, based on Michaux’s drawings.

Can you tell us about the origins of this piece?

HENRI MICHAUX : MOUVEMENTS grew out of a volume containing a poem and 64 drawings by Henri Michaux that had been on my bookshelf for more than twenty years. For a long time, I would leaf through it without ever imagining that it might become material for dance. Then one day, my perception shifted: these abstract drawings, these ink blots, suddenly seemed to me like a genuine choreographic score. Each form contained a direction, an energy and an organisation of movement that could be translated into the body … The realisation was immediate – as if the book had simply been waiting for me to be ready to recognise the movements inscribed within it and allow them to take shape in space.

How did you translate these drawings into movement? Can you give us an insight into the research process?

We worked in a very concrete way: I took the drawings one by one, in the order in which they appear in the book. The dancers were dressed entirely in black, so that they themselves became marks within the white space of the studio. Whenever a drawing was too complex to be rendered by a single body, I divided the form among several dancers.

In order to work with precision, I projected each drawing on a very large scale onto a wall. This allowed us to see its structure and energy clearly. Gradually, as we moved from one drawing to the next, the structure of the piece seemed to emerge by itself: the way the forms followed one another, how variations were introduced, or how we played with the blank pages. Once this logic had been found, everything fell into place with a certain sense of inevitability.

Interview: Wilson Le Personnic (for Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, 11 December 2025, https://www.theatredelaville-paris.com/fr/theatre-sans-frontieres/lart-comme-celebration-entretien-avec-la-choregraphe-quebecoise-marie-chouinard?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

MOUVEMENTS

A rolling race

a boiling crawl

teeming unit

dancing block

A defenestrated flies off

torn up and down

torn all over

torn never to attach again

Man bracing

man leaping

man hurtling

man for the lightning operation

for the storm operation

for the harpoon operation

for the shark operation

for the bursting operation

Man not by flesh

but through emptiness and evil and intestinal torches

and flashes and nervous discharges

and setbacks

and returns

and rage

and tearing

and entanglement

and taking off in sparks

Man not by abdomen and buttock plates or vertebrae

but through his currents, his weakness what recovers from shock, his

startings

man by the moon and burning powder and the bazaar itself

from the movement of others

and the storm and the wind rising and chaos never ordered

Man all flags outside, slapping in the wind rustling his instincts

man who thrashes the parrot

who has no joints

who does no farming

goatman

crestman

with spines

with shortcuts

tuft man, galvanizing his rags

man with secret supports, rocketing far from his degrading life

Desire barking in the dark is the many-sided form of this being

Flashes scissoring

forking

flashes radiating

flashes across the whole compass rose

To the noises, to the roaring

if one gave a body!

To the sounds of the balafo and the piercing drill

to the foot-stamping teenagers who do not yet know

what it means that their chests feel about to burst

to the joltings, rumblings, surgings

to tides of blood in the arteries suddenly changing direction

to thirst

to thirst especially

thirst never quenched

if one gave a body!...

Soul of lasso

of alga

of jack, grapple and swelling wave

of hawk, gnu, elephant seal

triple soul

eccentric soul

zealot soul

electrified larva soul coming to bite the surface

soul of beatings and gnashing of teeth

overhanging soul always straightened again

With disregard to any heaviness

any languor

any geometry

any architecture

disregarding: SPEED!

Movement and ripping apart of internal exasperation more than

movements of walking

movements of explosion, denial, stretching in all directions

unhealthy attractions, impossible desires

gratification of the flesh struck in the neck

headless movements

What good's a head when overwhelmed?

Movement of folding and coiling inward while

waiting for better

movements of inner shields

movements with multiple jets

residual movements

movements instead of other movements that can't be shown

but that inhabit the spirit

with dust

with stars

with erosion

with landslides

and vain latencies...

Festival of stains, scale of arms

movements

we jump into "nothing"

turning efforts

being alone, we are the crowd

What countless number advances

adds, expands, expands!

Goodbye fatigue

farewell efficient bipedal at the station of the bridge abutment

the sheath torn, we are other

any other

we no longer pay tribute

a corolla opens, bottomless dive...

The stride now has the length of hope

the leap has the length of thought

it has eight legs if we have to run

it has ten arms if we join forces

completely rooted, when we have to hold

never beaten

always returning

new returning

while soothed the keyboard master feigned sleep!

Henri Michaux, 1951

Translation © Howard Scott

With the permission of the right-holders Henri Michaux and Editions Gallimard

MAGNIFICAT Choreography Marie Chouinard Music Johann Sebastian Bach: Magnificat BWV 243, performed by La Chapelle Royale + Collegium Vocale Gent, Conductor: Philippe Herreweghe. Recording used with the permission of PIAS Recordings Lighting + Set Design + Costumes + Make-up Marie Chouinard Creation Madrid en Danza Festival, Madrid, 25. Mai 2025

HENRI MICHAUX: MOUVEMENTS Artistic Direction + Choreography + Vocal Score Marie Chouinard Music Louis Dufort Lighting + Set design + Video + Costumes + Hairstyle Marie Chouinard Texts and Drawings: Henri Michaux, from the book "Mouvements" (1951), with the permission of the right-holders Henri Michaux and Editions Gallimard Translation Howard Scott Voice Gérard Reyes Creation ImPulsTanz, Vienna International Dance Festival, Wien, 2. August 2011

Dancers Michael Baboolal, Adrian W.S. Batt, Julianna Bryson, Justin Calvadores, Rose Gagnol, Valeria Galluccio, Béatrice Larouche, Luigi Luna, Carol Prieur, Arnaud Mongeon, Jérôme Zerges Rehearsal Director Paige Culley Touring Martin Coutu Technical Director + Stage Manager Félix Lefebvre Lighting Manager Tristan-Olivier Breiding Sound Manager Maxime Lambert International Representation Julie George Guest Performance Support Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), Vertretung der Regierung von Québec in Berlin

Production Compagnie Marie Chouinard Co-production HENRI MICHAUX: MOUVEMENTS: ImPulsTanz (Wien) Funding Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), Conseil des arts de Montréal (CAM), Canada Council for the Arts (CAC)

www.mariechouinard.com

The COMPAGNIE MARIE CHOUINARD is proud to be carbon neutral. Since 2020, the company has analyzed and offset the carbon footprint of its tours, its productions and its studios. The company supports the Quebec initiative, Carbone boréal, which reforests naturally deserted terrain in the boreal forests north of Lake Saint Jean. These are public lands which are protected by their designation as experimental forests in conjunction with the Quebec Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks. This project is also used for scientific research.