by MARITES CARINO

Perched atop a foam block on a well-worn yoga mat in her rehearsal studio six stories above the Main, Marie Chouinard remembers feeling the first hints at her career calling during her early 20s. “Somehow I knew there was something I did not know that was going to be my life,” she says. “And I knew it was something like a destiny. It was such a strong feeling. But I was like, ‘What is it?’ But I felt it.”

That elusive “it” surfaced as the arts of dance and choreography. Since her first official creation back in 1978, Crystallization, the now internationally renowned choreographer hasn’t looked back. Currently heading up Compagnie Marie Chouinard, which just celebrated its 15th birthday, the choreographer has over 50 works under her belt—more than one for every year of her life.

The ebullient Chouinard sums it up as a desire to “create something in time and space. And this urge is so strong. I don’t need to wait for an inspiration. It’s there all the time.” However, Chouinard explains, the starting point for each of her works is what she calls a small “kernel” of an idea.

For bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, which launches the Montreal High Lights Festival next month, Chouinard’s “kernel” concept was to “break down our normal pattern of movement by giving it new extensions, new directions and new ways of moving through space.” In the creation process, she gave dancers a mishmash of props including crutches, pointe shoes, canes and wheeled platforms, got them to play around and then worked with how these objects could vary their methods of locomotion.

This two-act work for 10 is Chouinard’s lengthiest oeuvre to date, alluding, as we could infer from the props, to notions and degrees of freedom. For the soundtrack, composer-musician Louis Dufort manipulates Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a set of pieces Chouinard has been itching to use for years—specifically the celebrated solo piano recordings by Glenn Gould.

Creating extensions of the body is nothing new for Chouinard. In her previous works, horns, tails, bumps, humps and elongated fingers were part of her costumes. “It’s what you feel so much in dancing,” she says, gradually extending her arms and reaching out with outstretched palms. “When you open your arms like this, you feel it. You’re always into projecting lines into the invisible.”

As for visible lines, if there’s another discipline Chouinard gets excited about, it’s the visual arts. Development of her next project, Mouvements, which revolves around drawings by painter Henri Michaux, is already well underway.

So how clear, I wonder, is her vision of a work before she starts? Chouinard laughs, flipping back her signature wispy mane. “It’s like what Picasso said: ‘If I knew what the painting was going to be, why would I paint it?’” she replies. “So why be a choreographer if it’s already all in your mind? I love the adventure of creation. It’s like life. Why dare living if we all know before. We don’t know. You never know, and this is the magic of it.”

bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS at Place des Arts, Théâtre Maisonneuve, Feb. 15-16, 8 p.m. 790-1245 for tickets.