© Matthieu Vouzelaud
Faits et gestes explores different status we can give to movements: actions orientated towards a practical goal, abstract choreographic sequences and communicative gestures. The dancers focus on the multiple ways in which gestures can suggest movements: preparing for a movement to come, aiming for absent targets, indicating, pointing, selecting or transferring aspects of other movements. These movements are not self-sufficient, they refer to something beyond themselves. Even when what they are referring to is unknown, the fact that they call for something else remains present. It is these various ways of calling for through movement that are unfolded on stage.
There is a parallel between this research and the pieces by Johan Jakob Froberger present in Faits et gestes. They are funeral orations that have an explicitly rhetorical dimension. They recreate the articulation and even some of the figures of speech of verbal language. As our gesture phrases, these musical figures do not have a defined signification, but always seems to call for meaning. Counterpoint, another major field of research in baroque music, is also present in the piece through a work on improvisation.
In the group sequences, the movement materials are set, but their order, orientation and length as well as the relationships with the other dancers are improvised. The composition is not designed from the outside but emerges from the choices made by each dancers based on different set of rules, creating an internal choreography that has its own structure.
Credits
Choreography: Noé Soulier With: Lucas Bassereau or Anna Massoni, Norbert Pape, Nans Pierson et Noé Soulier Lights: Victor Burel Harpsichord : Maude Gratton Music: Johann Jakob Froberger, Tombeau sur la mort de Monsieur Blanrocher Johann Sebastian Bach, Le Clavier bien tempéré, Livre I, Fugue N. 4 en Do dièse Mineur, BWV 849 Johann Jakob Froberger, Lamentation sur la très douloureuse Mort de Sa Majesté, Ferdinand le Quatriesme Roy des Romains Johann Sebastian Bach, Le Clavier bien tempéré, Livre I, Prélude N. 8 en Mi bémol mineur, BWV 853
Production
Production: ND Productions Executive Production: Cndc – Angers Coproduction: Le CN D, Centre national de la danse – Pantin; Festival d’Automne à Paris; CDC – Toulouse / Midi-Pyrénées; PACT Zollverein – Essen; Tanzquartier Wien With the support of Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles d’Île-de-France – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication au titre de l’aide à la structuration
Comédie de Valence – Valence
Theater Freiburg – Freiburg
Charleroi Danse – Charleroi
Opéra de Rennes – Rennes
Berliner Festspiele – Berlin
Angers Nantes Opéra – Nantes
Le Quartz - Scène nationale de Brest – Brest
TAP - Théâtre Auditorium de Poitiers – Poitiers
Espaces Pluriels – Pau
Scène nationale Sud Aquitain – Anglet
Théâtre de la Ville - Paris + Chaillot, Théâtre National de la Danse – Paris
Sadler’s Wells – London
Sadler's Wells Theatre – London
Cité musicale – Metz
Musée de l'Orangerie – Paris