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maculture.fr | April 11, 2018
'Noisy Channels", Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, François Maurisse
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Since 2009, Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard have been collaborating to build a meticulous, precise and concentrated work, such as the pieces "Relative Collider" (2014) and "Maps" (2017), involving such complex, diverse and paradoxical notions as movement, spatial directions, mathematical combinatories, neuroscientific concepts, poetry and contemporary music. This time, for "Noisy Channels", the Franco-American duo responded to the Pop's invitation to come and create a site-specific form in its cramped space after only a few days of creative residence.
The Pop barge is an "incubator of staged music" and in this sense only offers forms of which music is an essential component. In "Noisy Channels", while the layers of music are composed live by Greg Beller, Santoro and Godard have put in place a simple choreographic score. Built on the basis of a sequence of time series and counter-time, (1, 12, 123, 123, 1234, 123, 123, 12, 1), the formula develops from a simple repetitive movement that subsequently generates variations and developments, while strictly limiting itself to the rhythmic framework imposed by the count.
These formal principles dictate for one hour the rules of a frank, direct and literal performance, willingly claiming to be an all-American modernism. In a certain purity of form, without scenery, costumes or frills, the dance steps are glued to the time of the metronome, confining themselves first to minute swings of weight, steps forward, contained arm movements made sometimes over time, sometimes against time. The trio formed by the dancers, each as concentrated as the next, seems to be driven by the same energy, rarely allowing themselves gaps and variations, operating the wheels of a well-oiled wave mechanism.
As the sound layers increase in intensity, the gestures become more and more intense, the bodies more loose. And it is undoubtedly at this moment, when the bodies (in their imperfections, their troubles) and the dancers (their hesitations, their errors) take charge of the basic algebraic formula, when the incorporation works in time, that Noisy Channels manages to get rid of its formalist straitjacket. In doing so, while we are surprised by larger, less controlled movements, the bodies rub against the machine, soften its systematic harshness and give the piece a very satisfactory efficiency.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
