“My approach to movement is rooted in practical actions that most of us are familiar with, such as hitting, avoiding or throwing. I insert many distortions that motivate the dancers’ movements without being identifiable by the spectators. These diverted actions captur a poetic dimension of movement that lies beneath discourse and narration. Far from being purely formal, they aim to trigger affects and emotions in both the performers and the audience without having to be part of a narrative structure.

In About Now, I confront this vocabulary of diverted actions with the steps of classical dance, that can be seen as stylized action verbs: “frappé, fouetté, assemblé… ”. With the dancers of NDT 2, we explored actions present in this classical vocabulary, and thereby delved into the sensual, experiential and affective dimension of this movement language, rather than into its formal geometric structure.

Ballet is disciplinary, and imposes a formal framework on the body that disregards its natural tendencies and conveys stereotyped gendered norms. The problematic nature of this heritage appears more and more clearly. It is, however, illusory to think that we could completely separate ourselves from this legacy. Instead of denying it, About Now aims to rework its principle guidelines to create a new classic movement language that draws on the richness of this tradition. This way, About Now generates a different relationship to the body, one that is affective and sensual, and that reconfigures the dynamics of power embedded in classical dance.” Noé Soulier