This Friday and Saturday, DanceHouse welcomes the Vancouver premiere of Montreal–based Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights to the stage. In honour of the 500th anniversary of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, the acclaimed choreographer Marie Chouinard creates a living canvas, embodying Bosch’s most infamous masterpiece. Accompanied by Louis Dufort’s original score and brimming with Chouinard’s visual wit, the performance unfolds in tableaus of wonderment and horror that combine erotic entanglement and stunning choreography.
“We are thrilled to welcome audience favourite Compagnie Marie Chouinard to the DanceHouse stage for their third appearance,” says Jim Smith, Artistic and Executive Director of DanceHouse. “Chouinard’s deep respect for the human body and its expressive potential is inspiring and thought-provoking. She consistently operates at the vanguard of her field, shattering boundaries with each of her astonishingly original and challenging works. When describing the creative process behind Hieronymus Bosch, Chouinard has expressed the joy she felt in paying homage to a master artist — I have no doubt audiences will be in awe of this exquisite creation.”
Since its premiere in the Netherlands in 2016, Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delightshas garnered rave reviews. Inspired by Bosch’s 16th century triptych currently on display in Madrid’s Prado Museum, each act of this hallucinatory three-act work embodies one of the three panels of the painting: The Garden of Delights, Hell, and Paradise. Chouinard and her ten dancers breathe life into Bosch’s writhing figures and tortured souls with movement and images as video projections draw the audience deeper into this surreal world. Populated by enormous engorged strawberries, happily naked bathers, bisected bodies, bird–headed monsters, Adam, Eve, and apparently God himself, this work can be viewed simultaneously as a celebration of the pleasures of the flesh, and a dire warning of the consequences of indulgence.
DanceHouse presents Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights, on stage at the Vancouver Playhouse March 15 & 16, 2019 at 8pm. Find tickets and details online at dancehouse.ca