Noe Soulier’s new creation took place at the Raffinerie in Brussels in may 22 as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, then at the Festival Montpellier Danse in june 2022.

Noé Soulier’s first new work as director of the Cndc-Angers places gesture at the heart of a research that is at once choreographic, musical and visual thanks to collaborations with artist Thea Djordjadze and composer Karl Naegelen. This piece for 7 dancers explores how movements can trigger emotions embedded in physical memory.

What do we perceive, in a conscious manner, of what our body does when we carry out an action? Is it possible to gain access to the sensations experienced by a body prior to language – in advance of the reflexes, automatic reactions and perceptions which structure our relationship with the world? Starting with the premise of the impossibility of a global experience of the organism, Noé Soulier constructs a choreographic fabric capable of revealing the sensory elements of the driving force which stirs us into action. In order to disrupt our perception-based habits, he has withdrawn the various discursive and narrative frameworks, thereby endowing our physical impulses with meaning – which in turn enables the building up of a vocabulary of practical actions which have been diverted away from their aim. Accompanied by musical gestures composed by Karl Naegelen, at odds with the chopped-up playing space designed by the artist Thea Djordjaze, the dancers combine, recompose, and juxtapose real-time activities, giving rise to a space in which a network of correspondences and echoes is in existence. In a continual to-and-fro between the visible and the invisible, the controllable and the unpredictable, this gestuality spreads throughout the whole space – in sensorial, sound and visual-based terms – digging deep into the multiple, memory-based layers of the performers themselves and throwing light upon a syntax of intensities.
Gilles Amalvi