At the Festival d'Avignon 2024, the talented director of the Centre national de danse contemporaine d''Angers, Noé Soulier, signed a new creation with harpsichordist Maude Gratton and her musical ensemble il Convito. A journey through works by Johann Sebastian Bach, with excerpts from the unfinished 'Art of the Fugue', L''Offrande musicale and sonata movements.
The choreographer continues his exploration of a story that reveals the implicit discourse of movement, joining the work on the inner architecture of music that drives musicians who listen to gesture. "In this piece, I return to Bach and the Art of the Fugue. There's something infinitely rich in this work that would allow us to work on it over and over again. It contains melodic themes and very moving harmonic structures, but this expressiveness is not structured as a narrative, unlike the sonatas of later periods. (...) This really resonates with what I'm trying to do in terms of movement. While my dance is not narrative, it''s not completely abstract either, since it is based on actions - hitting, catching, avoiding, throwing - which are diverted from their primary purpose, but carry an emotion within them. What's more, these sequences are also quite polyphonically structured.
