Autumn Fields

“Autumn Fields” est une chorégraphie caractéristique de l’héritage de Cunningham, formée de plusieurs séquences, reliées par aucun lien logique et qui évolue suivant sa propre structure.

Philip Glass is a former student of Nadia Boulanger and the “Julliard School of Music”. He is the leader of the so-called “repetitive” music, based on imperceptible progressions and subtle structural ‘sideslips’, greatly influenced by non-European musics.

For 12 years, the choreographer, Viola Farber, the remarkable personality of American “Modern Dance”, was one of the main interpreters of Merce Cunningham’s creations, before founding her own company. It was she who created, for and by the Ballet Théatre Contemporain, Autumn Fields, a choreography characteristic of Cunningham’s legacy, consisting of several sequences connected by no logical links.

The Ballet finds its unity in the music and scenography of François Morellet, a visual artist, who, after having participated in the research conducted by the GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel – Research Group on Visual Art) and worked with kinetic artists, strove to pursue a work where constructed abstract art and minimal art interweave with unexpected humour. Morellet has invented a system of grids suspended from the ceiling that gradually invade the stage above the dancers and whose size and shape vary according to a game of opening and closing so that their shadows cast on the stage accompany the constant movement of the dancers.

Each element of Autumn Fields evolves according to its own structure and the obsessional shifts of Philip Glass’s music, finding an echo in the imperceptible variations of Morellet’s grids and in Viola Farber’s choreography.