Noé Soulier
Performing Art
© Noé Soulier © Giulio Paolini – Avec l’aimable autorisation de la Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini, Turin ©
Created by Noé Soulier
With Caroline Camus Caplain and Aurélie Gavelle of Centre Pompidou, Théo Duporté, Simon Lepeut, Malak Maatoug, Todd Narbey, Vincent Robert, Heiner Scheel de Globart / Monin and Saber Lakhdari of Arôm Paris
Curatorial advice, Marcella Lista
Lighting and stage design, Victor Burel and Noé Soulier
A production by ND Productions (Paris), Alma Office/Anne-Lise Gobin // With support from Fondation d’entreprise Hermès as part of its New Settings programme // A coproduction with Musée national d’art moderne Centre Pompidou (Paris) ; Centre de Développement Chorégraphique Toulouse/Midi-Pyrénées ; CND Centre national de la danse (Pantin) ; Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris) ; Festival d’Automne à Paris // In association with Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris) ; Festival d’Automne à Paris // With support from DRAC Ile-de-France – ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, in the form of structural aid.
Noé Soulier is an associate artist at the CND Centre national de la danse. // Noé Soulier is an associate artist at the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique Toulouse/Midi-Pyrénées during the period 2016-2018.
Noé Soulier has devised a show for looking at works of art, not by wandering around museum galleries, but from our theatre seat. They will be manipulated before our very eyes, conversing with one another via a choreography in which gesture and the work itself interpret each other mutually.
With the relationships between “performing arts” and “exhibition-based arts” continuing to evolve, giving rise to multiple formats in which moving bodies occupy museum spaces, Noé Soulier wondered how this equation could be displaced. What if it was the works of art that were made to accommodate to a new space, rather than the moving bodies? And what if objects were to take over the framework of performing arts? Shifting the term “performing arts” from “arts of performance” to “performance of arts”, Noé Soulier confronts a selection of works taken from collections at the Musée national d’art moderne Centre Pompidou with the specific constraints of the stage - its temporality, and its viewing apparatus. In doing so, the museum-based movements, those of the manipulation of the works, also change in statute. By means of the cautious lifting up, moving, and arranging, the exhibition invents itself before our very eyes. The effect is similar to a montage of images, durations, and materialities, each of which tells a story of parallel art. As in each of his works, such as Mouvement sur mouvement or more recently Faits et gestes, Noé Soulier questions what dance does. By seeking to bring to light the point of indeterminacy between looking at and the object looked at, he exposes what happens when the goal of a utilitarian gesture becomes blurred by its performative activation. On the fringes, the works and gestures which serve to reveal them perform together.
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