Assaï

Metaphor of an unusual piece from one end to the other impeccably composed. Bagouet juggles here with his own culture, he will not be afraid to spray in the next step, with Le Saut de l’ange.

Choreography: Dominique Bagouet

I had been interested for a long time in Pascal Dusapin’s music and his different compositions, a few of which I became familiar with (“Pièces fugitives”, “Tre scalini”…). However, I used to consider that music hardly compatible with choreography, but by this very fact, all the more attractive.

I had to create a play for the Biennale Internationale de la Danse de Lyon, and Musica wanted to present Pascal’s works. This situation and my desire to work with him did the rest. After having seen my last three shows, he offered me “Assaï”, a new compositon presented in Venice, which had given its name to a complete opus and which was in a way its prelude (1st act). Then I ordered from him a play especially written for us, “Haro”, in three parts which could be considered as three other acts, distinct but matching at the same time.

So, I did not really choose “Assaï”, nor “Haro”, but anyway I felt completely confident, even if I felt sometimes a bit dizzy due to the balance of power between this music’s lyrical strength mostly designed for concerts and played by a philarmonic orchestra of 63 musicians, and the company’s ten dancers.

My sensations were numerous right from my first listenings and, at last, I let myself follow an impulse – even before creating the movements – of spaces of shades and monochrome lights, deep and powerful, as if they had come back from my old passion for the pictures in expressionist films.

So I first imagined a kinetic division from the musical scores, and after that, I progressively drew a kind of ‘story board’ with its main lines, and a series of ‘takes’, one at a time. I went on to detail in each drawing the stage-lighting, the scenario, and the dancers’ main locations and routes.

At last, I had to admit that putting into dance the music that had provoked inside me quite a melancholy that I also wanted to preserve was really difficult.

The risk of overdoing it, of burying the choreography in the signifying of symbols made my conception of the show change to a very shaped, non-narrative playwriting, mostly emphasizing the dance’s different states, natures, looks and behaviours, while dance and music were constantly communicating:  it was a relationship going back and forth, either staying close to the score and the melodic line or, on the contrary, straying very far from them, allowing very free and even sometimes humorous developments.

Sources: Dominique Bagouet – June 12th 1986

Credits

Choreography: Dominique Bagouet

Duration: 23′

Dancers: Jean-Pierre Alvarez, Christian Bourigault, Claire Chancé, Sarah Charrier, Bernard Glandier, Michel Kelemenis, Catherine Legrand, Dominique Noel, Sonia Onckelinx, Michèle Rust.

Music: Pascal Dusapin

Scenery: Dominique Bagouet and Christian Halkin

Stage lighting: Dominique Bagouet and Laurent Matignon

Costumes: Dominique Bagouet and Dominique Fabrègue

Direction: Charles Picq

Production: Les Carnets Bagouet

Date of création: Septembre 20th 1986, Opéra de Lyon.

Performance recorded in January 1987, Cratère, théâtre d’Alès

Last update: December 2012