Maguy Marin, l’Urgence d’Agir

CANADIAN PREMIERE

We are in 1981… Well, I am actually in the stomach of a young 30-year-old choreographer. My mother. Her name is Marguerite France Marin and she is the daughter of Spanish dissidents. People call her Maguy. For her next piece, inspired by Samuel Beckett, she has imagined a gaggle of grotesque elderly individuals, with embittered bodies and celestial faces. I was born a few months later in the midst of this unusual, clay-encrusted troupe. I spent my whole childhood under the feet of this stimulating and strange dance.

“Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” Such are the words that open and close the performance – and yet even to this day May B does not seem to be nearly at it’s end: thirty-seven years and seven hundred plus performances later the piece continues to bring the dusty beings to life, making it possible for this rag-clad expression of humanity to come and go, and never, it would seem, to fade completely away. Traversing memories and time, the piece reminds us of our own eventual departure, our dearly departed, our hardship as well as our ability to resist and begin again and again and again. The characters in May B first emerged in 1981 and have remained the same. I’m fairly certain that they will even manage to outlive us.

The Maguy Marin Company holds a place apart within the milieu of contemporary dance. Its evolution and the political standpoints it assumes demonstrate an engagement that demands audaciousness, courage and combativeness and the formulation of exemplary responses to universal questions that are currently particularly relevant. Today more than ever the company and its work implore us to consider the prime importance of taking care of our children and cultivating and sharing with the younger generations the autonomy that results from critical thought and from action, along with the desire born in effort and the joy of creation. How can we nourish ourselves through exchanges with others, through the primal energy generated through the act of “working together”? How to avoid resignation? How to take action?

“There are gestures that help us to live” she said.

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