THE RITE OF SPRING (2018)
Concept: Xavier Le Roy
Performance: Salka Ardal Rosengren, Eleanor Bauer or Alexandre Achour, Scarlet Yu
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Sound Design: Peter Boehm
Recording: Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Simon Rattle
Management/Organisation: Vincent Cavaroc / Fanny Herserant
Production: Le Kwatt (F) and illusion & macadam (F)
Coproduction: La Biennale di Venezia Thanks to Centre National de la Danse - France
Le Kwatt is supported by Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication - France, as a Compagnie à Rayonnement National et International
This work is a new version of the choreography and concept developed by Xavier le Roy in 2007 for Le sacre du printemps. Having no musical training, Le Roy had ventured into a laborious process of studying a conductor's inter-pretation as if it were a choreography of its own. An inversion of cause and function unfolds: the gestures and the movements that are meant to prompt musicians to play appear at the same time to be produced by the music they are supposed to produce. When is one playing and when is one being played by this highly motile music? What is the moment before and after the sound, the movement, the intention to move, the motorics of the play? How much is our pleasure in listening to music rise in live performance conducted by a desire for, and a trouble about, the synchronicity of a well-functioning machine? There are as many bodies as there are different roles and perspectives in lis-tening: what hears the musician, the conductor or the spectator when hearing as a result becomes part of an embodied, inevitably visceral experience of movement and sound?
For the Biennial of Danza 2016 Xavier Le Roy was invited to present 3 soli, for an evening consisting of : Product of Circumstances (1999), Self Unfinished (1998), Le Sacre du printemps (2007). Unfortunately he fractured his ankle 3 months before the performance and was unable to go on stage in June. Marie Chouinard suggested that he looked for someone to reinterpret these chore-ographies. Each of these pieces having very different qualities and forms from each other, he imagined specific ways of work and re-interpret each piece. This project was planned to be shared among 4 interpreters in order to face the immense task of learning and reinterpreting these 3 solos in such a short time. This project could not be completed due to the impossibility for the chosen interpreters to be available. Aside from Joao Martins who performed Self Unfinished for last year chapter#1 and whose interpretation as well as the re-ception of the work gave us the desire to continue the reinterpretation of the other pieces.
As 2nd chapter, Scarlet Yu, Salka Ardal-Rosengren and Eleanor Bauer created together with Xavier Le Roy and Peter Böhm a new version of Le scare du printemps (2007).
While extending the subjects that this piece addressed (see above), this version puts at work questions related to the transmission / interpretation / translation of a pre-existing work. The three performers have different personalities that will multiply the perspectives by adding a level of interpretation to the pre-existing material of the choreography made in 2007, which is itself an interpretation: of the music composed in 1913 by Igor Stravinsky, of " the argument" written in 1911 by Nicola Roerich, from the recording of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra made in 2004, recomposed for the situation by Peter Böhm in 2007, but also, of the way of hearing, listening and distributing the modes of address to the spectators that are at the base of this situation. On the other hand, this version seeks to diffract the role of the conductor by sharing it among several to create relays, overlays, juxtapositions and produce a complex game of subjectivities to disturb the order of established roles