Review of Marie Chouinard's Orpheus and Eurydice

Compagnie Marie Chouinard has brought to Calgary a bold new play: Orpheus and Eurydice. The dancers, ever fearless and ever daring, tell the Greek myth in a whole new limelight; the mood on stage changes quickly and suddenly, and sometimes bizzarely, from glee to dread to pain, as we watch the troupe revel in orgasmic sex, travel the depths of the underworld and gasp for breath after expelling all human sound from their bodies in an eerie but enchanting keen.

The play itself was not inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and his lover, but rather of Chouinard's interest in the idea of how sound is extracted from the human body. The performance highlights the range of possible sounds a human can make - from the wordless expressions of ecstasy, agony and pain to the articulate recital of poetic philosophy. The highly impressionable music created for the show stands as a piece of its own, using a mixture of horns and bass notes that can be felt, not only in the ears, but also throughout the body.

So how, you may ask, do Orpheus and Eurydice enter into the equation? Orpheus, in Greek mythology, was an eloquent poet whose words were so beautiful, so riveting, that not only did he hold mankind in his thrall, but he also impressed the gods. On his wedding day, his wife, Eurydice, was bitten by a poisonous snake and died of the venom. Desperate to have her back, Orpheus pleaded with Hades, god of the underworld, to release her. Hades agreed to let him take her back, on the condition that while they were making their way back into the upper world, Orpheus was not allowed to look back at Eurydice. However, Orpheus does look back at her before she crosses the threshhold into the upper world and loses her forever. Through the demonstration of the difficulties involved in extracting sound from the body, particularly beautiful sound, the audience gains an appreciation of Orpheus's feat of persuading a god to grant him his wish. The lack of utterance from either Orpheus or Eurydice after he turns around, thus losing her forever, communicate a lasting pain, a silencing that is louder than any words.

The expression of emotion and movement are also central to the play, where the dancers' gaping mouths become a portal from which sound is emitted and extracted, where their snake-like and yet angular moves on stage unite grace with power, and where their exaggerated facial expressions, ranging from absurdist hilarity to profound shock and horror, create a tableau of raw and unfiltered human expression at its purest.

Exploring the depths of human nature at its most revealing, Orpheus and Eurydice is certainly worth the watch, particularly if you are on a quest to become more open-minded. It is not a shy performance, but rather an extremely fresh new plunge into the realm of what is possible, not only making it probable, but also transforming it into reality.