MAGNIFICAT & The Rite of Spring

Two iconic works, two musical worlds, one distinctive signature: in this evening, Marie Chouinard brings together spirituality, physicality and radical presence. Both choreographies are rooted in ritualistic music: MAGNIFICAT as a Christian hymn of praise, The Rite of Spring as an evocation of archaic sacrificial rites. Together, they present Chouinard as a pioneer of contemporary dance – aesthetically confrontational and untamed.

In MAGNIFICAT, members of the company move in skin-toned briefs and halo-like headpieces, forming expansive group sequences as well as intimate trios, duets and solos. Chouinard translates the classical motifs of Bach’s music into an excessive physicality: song becomes movement, power and submission, and jubilation and ecstasy unfold in a forceful and ironic visual language that shows the dissolution of boundaries and at the same time forms community.

The Rite of Spring is Chouinard’s first choreography to take a musical score as its point of departure. From Stravinsky’s driving music, she develops a work that celebrates the individual while making the collective palpable. Solos take centre stage; every movement expresses vital energy, every body holds a secret. Time stretches, everything happens at once, as if Chouinard were choreographing the moment immediately after life first came into being.

Between the early The Rite of Spring (1993) and the most recent MAGNIFICAT (2025), a wide temporal arc unfolds. What holds it together is a sustained focus on the body as a site of ritual, desire, exhaustion and transcendence. Chouinard’s work is less a narrative of development than an act of insistence: on intensity, on immediacy, on a form of dance that resists all smoothing.

Marie Chouinard was born in Québec and worked for twelve years as a solo dancer before founding the Compagnie Marie Chouinard in 1990. Since then, her works have been presented internationally and have entered the repertoires of major institutions. Alongside her choreographic practice, she works as a director, author and visual artist. Her life’s work has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Canadian Governor General’s Performing Arts Award.