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Mouvement sur mouvement

Sat 8 Feb 2015 at 3 pm

Noé Soulier

Scheduled for the last day of the exhibition The Yvonne Rainer Project - Lives of Performers, Noé Soulier's solo talks of the geometry of the dance movement, based on William Forsythe's video Improvisation Technologies.

Mouvement sur mouvement (Movement on Movement, 2013) is based on the video Improvisation Technologies in which William Forsythe  demonstrates various geometrical tools for analysing and creating movements. Soulier utilises these instructional images to create a dance score, and while executing the sequences of movements he speaks of the use of geometry in dance and its consequences for our apprehension of the body. He moves successively from ordinary to danced movement, referencing along the way different eras and styles in the history of dance. Containing allusions to Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Simone Forti, this spoken segment – by turns descriptive, introspective, theoretical and fictional – counterpoints the action, sometimes clashing, sometimes harmonising with it.

 

Instead of Forsythe’s didactic approach, Soulier works speculatively, speaking in a mix of the descriptive, the theoretical and the personal. Out of this arise new arrangements of meanings that broaden our field of knowledge. In this way he establishes a mutual understanding with viewers carried away by this lecture-performance and the combination of intelligent movement and fascination that a body in motion can generate.

 

Noé Soulier’s career path has led him from classical to contemporary dance – with philosophy studies along the way – and to a merging of philosophical and artistic considerations in works that explore the relationships between movement and thought processes. Drawing on an extraordinary miscellany of approaches and discourses – borrowed from music, classical and contemporary dance, cinema, science and philosophy – he delves into the way we perceive and interpret movement in media including choreography, installations, theoretical essays and performance. Since his dance work Le Royaume des ombres (The Realm of Shadows, 2009) and its critique of classical ballet, he has been working with a singular fusion of language and gesture. Petites perceptions (Small Perceptions, 2010) looks at music from the point of view of the cognitive sciences, while highlighting fluctuation of movement and memory. Signe blanc (White Sign, 2012) revisits pantomime, seeking an equilibrium between speech, silence and gesture. Idéographie (Ideography, 2012) is a choreography of “ideas” based on texts relating to philosophy, music and linguistics.

 

Sun 8 Feb

15:00 / Noé Soulier / Mouvement sur mouvement
16:00 / discussion between Noé Soulier and Chantal Pontbriand

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