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There’s a moment in Marie Chouinard’s Orpheus and Eurydice when, all the dancers onstage, a complexly and articulately-writhing energy comes over the ensemble and turns it into a mad bacchanal herd of grimacing, bug-eyed, hissing demons. It’s so sensorially overwhelming (it’s directed, like all of the piece, to play straight out into the house) one feels, without abstraction, like a witness to any given Sunday in the furnaces of Hades. It’s the hell-as-sexy-dungeon that’s become as common as the fire-and-brimstone nightmare of the Bible. The design palette is narrow, stage dressed as a white box, dancers changing in and out of their own personal wardrobes by Liz Vandal (baggy denimesque overalls worn bib-down, hotpants matching or in gold lamé, white fur accessories, and gold pasties) for nearly every scene. And there are a lot of scenes, far more than there are transitions between them.

Manuel Roque, James Viveiros, Carla Maruca, Dorothea Saykaly, Carol Prieur and Mysterious Hairy Ball. Photo by Marie Chouinard.

It’s an odd choice to take a story with such a simple, iconic arc and interpret it as a succession of often-looping tableaux. But Chouinard isn’t interested in retelling the story. She does that as well, early on, charging Mark Eden-Towle with the task of hitting the plot points in a screwed, distorted voice spilling up out of compulsive, agonizing restlessness. To perform Chouinard’s movement is to be infected by it: Her vocabulary, classically-grounded as it is, is dance-as-possession, reminiscent of Jennifer Carpenter’s choreographic approach to the same in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. But this Orpheus consists mostly of these tableaux alone, studies on and extrapolations in movement of the myth’s central themes and images. Which is fine. When done in dance it’s traditionally a one-act; some kind of dissective approach needs to be taken in order to present Orpheus and Eurydice as an evening-length that isn’t just glacially-slow, and so Chouinard gives us stage pictures and motifs that fold the story over and over on itself, much like Orpheus must have forever relived in torture his ill-fated decision to turn and look. Read More…