Marie Chouinard's First Chapter: A Retrospective Biennale Danza

The International Festival of Contemporary Dance of the Venice Biennale, now under the direction of Marie Chouinard for the next three years, opened with a program that feels more like a retrospective than a forward-looking festival. Chouinard, a Quebec-born Canadian who has led her own company in Montreal since 1990, programmed works spanning from the last century to nine years ago, offering a guided tour of her artistic imagination rather than a curated survey of contemporary dance. The festival's title, 'First Chapter,' suggests a tentative start. The opening featured Lucinda Childs, awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, with revivals of 'Katema' (1978) and a fragment of 'Dance II' (1979) in Campo Sant'Agnese. Critic Stefano Tomassini argues these minimalist works failed to engage with the urban space, merely replicating the flow of people and capital. In contrast, Benoît Lachambre's intervention with Biennale College dancers, using simple bricks to create pathways on a white carpet, succeeded in echoing Venice's suspended mobility. The highlight was Childs' 'Dance' (1979, revived 2009) at Teatro alle Tese, with music by Philip Glass and projections by Sol LeWitt, exploring the living archive of dance through doubling and repetition. Tomassini laments the absence of Italian contemporary dance in the program and calls on the Biennale to generate new impulses rather than cater to the market.