Created in 2015 at the Colours International Dance Festival in Stuttgart, Soft virtuosity, still humid, on the edge traces ingenious trajectories like brushstrokes through a fluid continuum, that moves from extremely slow to frenetic, from constraint to freedom, from en pointe to demi pointe, in a process of constant change. Marie Chouinard invents a fierce dazzling choreographic grammar, which conveys the devotion and the passion of the ten dancers, all first-class performers.
Engaged in an inner dialogue, with the sweeping canvas of their movements in the background, amplified in an exciting extended space-time interval, in the highly detailed horizontal progression from one side to the other of the stage, the performers dramatically highlight the faces, the expressions, the forms. The deep blue of the group is marbled by the transparent whiteness of a dancer wearing flowing veils: harmony and conflict breathe together in the bodies and the film on stage, which like the dancers is also live.
With a work as accomplished and as highly defined as this, the atmosphere is one of supreme concentration. The dance is overwhelming, powerful, convinced, pondered and spontaneous at the same time. The dancers could not be more diversified, with tall slender women and more compact thick-set men, all driven however by the sacred fire, with the beauty and sensuality that arise from movement, with a solid and expressive presence, with the honesty that is the most highly-prized quality in today’s dance, avoiding specious intellectualisms, but moving on the contrary within an intellectually-elevated atmosphere, discretely cultured, intelligent by nature.
