-
Toute la Culture | March 7, 2018
Liz Santoro et Pierre Godard, Les Métronomes de La Pop, Amélie Blaustein Niddam
[txt] [pdf] [www]
Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard: An unusual piece in an equally unusual place....
Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard have been working together for almost 10 years now, exactly since 2009, the year in which Liz Santoro developed her first shows. While Liz graduated from Boston Ballet School with a degree in neuroscience, Pierre went on to study engineering before entering the theatre. Two diametrically opposed paths that explain their taste for mathematics, a science that forms the basis of their choreographies. Their pieces, such as "Relative Colliders" or, more recently, "Maps", are characterized by a spatial geometry of a precision that is not without evoking that of a Swiss watchmaking mechanism. It was this last piece that gave rise to "Noisy Channels", a work in which the choreographers "found themselves confronted with a strange and delicious controversy, a problem about how to count steps and times. Half of the dancers counted the rhythm like classical musicians, the "one" on the beat, while the other half counted them on the up-beat, like jazz musicians. A paradoxical situation that affected the performers' ability to design and then carry out their movements.
So, what to do when a dispute arises between the protagonists of a work, if not "to go against common sense, to bring to light the complexity of reality, to open up the possibility of new exploration". As soon as I say, as soon as I do! These questions of space and time, intervals and boundaries, continuous or discontinuous principles, forced the choreographers to rework their proposal by creating a compromise between the two times until the sequences follow one another and fit together perfectly, until the piece flows like a long quiet river, with its changes of rhythm, waves and eddies. Abstract, certainly, but fascinating.
The realization of this work took place in an unusual place for a choreographic evening, namely on a barge, which made the show - already unusual in itself - all the more attractive. Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard seized the opportunity to present their work on a barge dedicated since March 2016 to the accompaniment of creations in production and co-production, questioning the relationships that individuals and society have with sounds and music. The first of the six shows planned this year within this "incubator of staged music", La Pop, a former opera house, moored on the water of the bassin de la Villette, quai de la Loire in Paris, was dedicated to our two choreographers. "A nest that is not really cozy or relaxing, sometimes even difficult to stabilize," says one of its directors, Olivier Michel, "but a nest that has brought out artistic objects that are as atypical as they are captivating"...
"Noisy Channels" / Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard, associated artists at CDCN / Atelier de Paris, Péniche La Pop, Paris, from 6 to 8 March 2018.
*In music, the beat is the basic unit of time that defines rhythm, which is characterized by a repeated sequence of strong or weak beats divided into bars organized by tempo indications. The high point is the first time of the measurement, i.e. the number 1. The up-beat, on the other hand, is the last time of the measure, an unaccelerated beat.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
