Maguy Marin’s Urgent Life and Times: Vancouver International Film Festival at home - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Kaija Pepper
The name is immediately recognizable, despite the fact I’ve never seen one of her works: Maguy Marin, evoking cutting edge, highly theatrical and politically bold European dance. The documentary on the choreographer’s life and art — Maguy Marin: Time to Act — by her son, David Mambouch, has been doing the festival circuit since it was released in 2019, and for good reason. Time to Act offers an intimate, impressionistic view of an artist and a woman who, judging from the excerpts of her works shown in the film, should be better known in North America.
Over the decades, Marin has sustained her singular artistic vision: Hers is a dance driven not by the technical feats of the young, but one that finds a physical vocabulary through teasing out the human condition. Her dancers, too, are individuals with a desire to present something real about our shared humanity.
Marguerite “Maguy” Marin was born in Toulouse in 1951. She began her career as a dancer with Strasbourg Ballet and in the early 1970s became a soloist with Maurice Béjart’s Ballet of the 20th Century. Archival footage from 1975 of an ensemble of women in halter tops and leotards in Béjart’s Acqua Alta is one of many brief clips evoking the times throughout.
The 108-minute film is a little short on details, aiming instead for an overview not only of the art and the artist, but also of the family: Marin’s dominating father, her seamstress mother (who sewed costumes for the company), her daughter and, of course, her son, the filmmaker. Mambouch begins his film by immersing us in 1981, the year of his birth and also of the premiere of Marin’s May B, a controversial work that brought her international attention.
Rehearsals and performances of May B, which has remained active in the Company Maguy Marin repertoire, weave in and out of the film, a beautiful touchstone holding the many layers of past and present together. Inspired by Samuel Beckett, the work is titled after the Irish playwright’s mother, May. Beckett approved the project based on production notes Marin had sent him, and agreed to meet the then unknown young choreographer, who recalls him as being “very tall, very elegant.” In a 2015 revival, the Guardian’s Judith Mackrell described May B, with its “community of derelict souls,” as “a scrupulously moving, clever and funny homage.”
The archival clips of Marin’s large body of work show dancers who are indeed “free of [their] dancers’ bodies,” as Marin puts it — and, I would add, free in really interesting, character-rich ways. Like Pina Bausch and sometimes reminiscent of butoh, Marin presents people, not dancers, onstage. She wants to connect her dance to the real world, including its never-ending political sagas, where “the mega-rich, financiers, big businessmen, etc, make decisions and get politicians to apply them….”
The film’s French title, L’Urgence d’agir, carries the sense of urgency Marin expresses when talking about the class struggle that has only become more evident in the current pandemic.
Maguy Marin: A Time to Act is available for home screening throughout BC from Sept. 24 to Oct. 7 as part of the VIFF Connect series.
