Noé Soulier
First Memory
novembernov 16 – 19
© First Memory, Noé Soulier © Anna Van Waeg ©
© First Memory, Noé Soulier © Anna Van Waeg ©
© First Memory, Noé Soulier © Anna Van Waeg ©
Design and choreography, Noé Soulier
Featuring Stephanie Amurao, Lucas Bassereau, Julie Charbonnier, Adriano Coletta, Meleat Fredriksson, Yumiko Funaya, Nangaline Gomis
Staging, Thea Djordjadze
Lights, Victor Burel
Music, Karl Naegelen, created and recorded by the Ictus ensemble
Tom de Cock (percussions), Pieter Lenaerts (upright bass), Aisha Orazbayeva (violin), Tom Pauwels (guitar), Jean-Luc Plouvier (piano), Paolo Vignorelli (flute)
Light control, Benjamin Aymard
Sound management, Alain Cherouvrier
Produced by Cndc – Angers
Co-produced by Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels); Festival Montpellier Danse; Les Spectacles vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris); La Place de la Danse Centre de
Développement Chorégraphique National Toulouse – Occitanie; Theater Freiburg; Festival d’Automne à Paris
Co-directed by Les Spectacles Vivants – Centre Pompidou (Paris); Festival d’Automne à Paris
With support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels
France Culture is a partner of 6 x Noé Soulier
Noé Soulier’s first new work as director of the Cndc-Angers delves deeper into the question of the relationship between gesture and memory. At the heart of this choreographic, musical and visual arts-inspired experience, dance is used for dissecting, and for the extraction of signs. This enables new light to be thrown upon the affects in evidence beneath the apparent simplicity of everyday movements.
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 In order to disrupt our perception-based habits, he has withdrawn the various discursive and narrative frameworks, thereby endowing our physical impulses with meaning – which in turn enables the building up of a vocabulary of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 Djordjadze, 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.
In the same place