After presenting several solo works over the course of the past twenty years that explored the feminine psyche, Marie Chouinard has choreographed for the first time a solo for a male dancer, Des feux dans la nuit. Moving in a vivid, masterly fashion from one universe to another and from one poetic amalgam to another, Marie Chouinard creates an intense, disturbing variation on virility and the metaphors it suggests.

As in her previous works, this energetic and gentle, tormented yet serene solo celebrates a powerful instinct for life. With La Musique des mots by Rober Racine (a long-time creative associate) as its point of departure, the solo unfolds in space like a journey through the intimacy and fragility of man. Supported by a live piano performance, Marie Chouinard deciphers the twists and turns of the male universe, presenting a summary of life stripped of all artifice and quite open to the world. One after the other the dancer's movements stream forth, describing an emptiness in the dancing fires of the night, flaring up and letting go like inextinguishable embers, leaping forth before opening up to new horizons. Des feux dans la nuit is a generous, magnificent dance that gives the subconscious, the private, the shameful and the unconfessed more than their due. It is a dance where the silence between movements communicates a force of infinite goodness.

Solo

Length | 55 min

Created at TanzWochen Wien Festival, Vienna, Austria, July 30, 1999*

A Compagnie Marie Chouinard production