Artsex

Marie Chouinard's dance of desire

by Marcia B. Siegel

Theatrical dance for a couple of centuries has toyed with a paradox, both exploiting and restraining the body's ability to evoke pleasure. Dance is popular because it's sensual, but to avoid the slums of low entertainment, it somehow has to deny what it's suggesting. The 19th-century ballet had its water sprites and Oriental slaves to act out the fantasies of the decent folk. Before World War I, Nijinsky played various ambiguous primitives: the faun, the puppet Petrouchka, the spirit of the rose. Around the same time Ruth St. Denis undulated and twirled in devotional portraits of Asian mystics and goddesses. And though the classical pas de deux has acquired a more contemporary physicality, it's still pretty euphemistic because those two grappling figures can go just so far within the strictures of ballet technique.

Marie Chouinard, whose L'amande et le diamant ("The Almond and the Diamond") arrived from Montreal last week as a Dance Umbrella attraction, treads the art/porn borderline by framing erotic movement in exquisite lighting, sonic and visual technology, and an air of high aesthetics. I don't doubt the serious origins of this "carnal dance piece" in which dancers are "driven by a feeling of raw freedom" to present "an offering to the Other . . . a horizon that is open to all possibilities." But I also don't doubt my own eyes. For an hour, the 10 dancers postured and panted, groped one another and writhed in simulated pleasure. Forget the company's uplifting rhetoric -- outside of burlesque there's no dance that's a better turn-on.

Since its premiere three years ago at the Canada Dance Festival, L'amande et le diamant has undergone some significant changes. Chouinard seems to have cut its length by about half, deleted costume elements, and added a technical feature that qualified the piece for inclusion in the Boston Cyberarts Festival.

With wires and power packs wrapped around their bodies, the dancers could activate sounds by making a percussive gesture with an arm or a foot. Instead of belonging organically to the movement, the sounds emerged like the figments of a wizard's magic wand. Each dancer presided over a different sound -- in one section there were muted bells, in another tuned drums -- and together they effected a pleasant tinkling or throbbing, like the sound of rain. All this looked quite naive to me after the computer-driven sonics, laser effects, and digital imaginings that have populated stages in recent years.

The dancers got rid of the cumbersome gadgetry quite soon, though, and settled down to the erotics of the piece. They began in solos and small groups, introducing a body language of rubbery torsos and limbs, sinuous kicks and huge clawing gestures. Five women lined up like furious strippers and pushed their curves into the audience's face with karate-like swipes. But it wasn't anger so much as auto-eroticism that seemed to stimulate them. A man and a woman appeared. She crawled away from him; he followed, closed in, grabbed her by the crotch and hoisted her to his chest.

This novel partnering initiated a whole series of duets, where most of the time men fastened on women from behind and lifted them by the breasts or the crotch. Women clutched their partners' butts. A man draped himself upside down over a woman's hip and back; she massaged his face. A man held both sides of a woman's head and pulled her along, both of them bent over into a crouch. They looked like fighting caribou. He ground her head into his privates. She seemed to want to get away, but a moment after she did get loose, she went back for more.

Quietly, furtively at first, then in mounting confidence, they all gasped and puffed with each pleasurable effort as they squirmed in addictive enactments of desire. In the last group scene, one woman beckoned one partner after another to fondle her while two other women improvised a childlike game. Although partners would often seem on the verge of combat, the most aggressive moves never landed on the opponent. A tense film of inhibition kept the sexual energy from becoming dangerous.

At moments, the group crossed behind the sexual players in wonderful shapes that evoked Egyptian or Minoan painting. They seemed to offer history's validation to an eroticism drawn from the movement explorations of our postmodern era -- stretch and pull your body all the ways you can, make a sound with the movement, aim a move at another person who'll bounce it back to you. Chouinard's dancers can do all this skillfully, but they often look frozen with intensity rather than released for some unknown adventure. All passion spent -- or saved -- they perform desire for our consumption.