Compagnie Marie Chouinard: Magnificat, Body Remix/Remix

Theaterhaus, Stuttgart
July 10, 2025

If Marie Chouinard, the grande-dame of Canadian choreographers, has become known for one creation, it’s surely bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG _vARIATIONS, in which she has the dancers use crutches and prostheses in what for many is a provocative, if matter-of-fact way. For this double bill, that piece has been reformulated into a shorter one-act work, performed alongside her new Magnificat, with both featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

In Magnificat, premiered only in June 2025 in Madrid, Chouinard reimagines Bach’s eponymous hymns of praise in honour of St. Mary in choreography that sits comfortably with the genius of the composer’s music, but that is also of today.

It opens unusually with the dancers stretching and warming up to the sound of an orchestra similarly tuning up and the audience chatting. At the end, we see them cool down. Quite what it adds to the piece is unclear although, even in silhouette, the fluidity of the dancers’ bodies is immediately striking. After a sports-like pre-game huddle, lights to black, and we’re off.

When the lights return, we find all the dancers are topless, wearing only skin-toned trunks and socks, and wide-brimmed headwear that look like hats from one angle and halos from another as they glow gold in the light. There are a lot of jiggling breasts but the sight is hardly shocking and it soon becomes unnoticeable.

Each movement has its own choreographic and lighting colour, the dance shifting easily from light and bouncy, to more earthy, floor-based. Whatever, it eases along very nicely, if anything getting lighter and brighter as the work progresses.

And there are many fabulous moments. The floor-based duet that starts the third movement and the effervescent fast dance that ends it. The group formations of the following movement. The skipping, bounding, light dance of a later movement that ends with one of the women on pointe, and a long kiss with one of the men; and the happy almost childlike spinning of that which follows. Best of all, a superb and quite unexpected balletic dance full of seriously fast footwork from one of the men before he’s joined by two other dancers.

Nicely tongue in cheek, Magnificat is magnificent. A joy and a dance that, like all the best, leaves you wanting more.

Although they do put in appearances, there’s not a lot of Goldberg Variations in Body Remix/Remix. Like its parent, it’s full of bizarre images of dancers equipped with crutches, prostheses and pointe shoes, on hands as well as feet that, if not imprison the body, mean it can only move in certain, sometimes awkward, ways.

But, no doubt because of its parentage, while sensitivities around the body mean it still provokes debate, it no longer surprises, let alone shock. It does remains interesting to an extent, but it’s like watching an experiment where you know the outcome beforehand.

Presented as part of the Colours International Dance Festival 2025