Assaï

In this piece from 1984, references to the expressionist cinema abound : “doctors” inspired by Caligari, creatures “Musidora”, girls how Lilian Gish in Les Deux Orphelines, etc..

“I was due to create a work for the Biennale Internationale de la Danse de Lyon, and Musica wanted Pascal Dusapin to provide the music. This situation, along with my wish to work with him, did the rest. After seeing my previous three shows, he suggested ‘Assaï’, a recent composition that had been played in Venice. This would lend its name to the whole work, for which it acts only as kind of prelude (1st act). From the first time I heard the piece, it evoked many different sensations and I finally went with one that, even before the movement was born, suggested monochrome areas of shade and light, powerful and deep, as if welling up from my old passion for the images of expressionist cinema. […] Then I had to deal with the real difficulty of ‘starting to dance’ with this music which provoked a melancholy in me which I still wished to preserve. The danger of emphasis, of drowning the choreography in symbolic meaning, steered the show’s concept towards a firmly-constructed non-narrative drama, bringing to the fore the different states, characters, facial expressions and behaviour of the dance, in constant dialogue with the music: a relationship that shifts back and forth, either very close for both the scoring and melodic line, or very distant, in the opposite direction, allowing a very free, sometimes humorous, development.”

Source : Dominique Bagouet, 12 juin 1986