Faits et gestes

Faits et gestes explores different status we can give to movements: actions orientated towards a practical goal, abstract choreographic sequences and communicative gestures. The dancers focus on the multiple ways in which gestures can suggest movements: preparing for a movement to come, aiming for absent targets, indicating, pointing, selecting or transferring aspects of other movements. These movements are not self-sufficient, they refer to something beyond themselves. Even when what they are referring to is unknown, the fact that they call for something else remains present. It is these various ways of calling for through movement that are unfolded on stage.

There is a parallel between this research and the pieces by Johan Jakob Froberger present in Faits et gestes. They are funeral orations that have an explicitly rhetorical dimension. They recreate the articulation and even some of the figures of speech of verbal language. As our gesture phrases, these musical figures do not have a defined signification, but always seems to call for meaning. Counterpoint, another major field of research in baroque music, is also present in the piece through a work on improvisation.

In the group sequences, the movement materials are set, but their order, orientation and length as well as the relationships with the other dancers are improvised. The composition is not designed from the outside but emerges from the choices made by each dancers based on different set of rules, creating an internal choreography that has its own structure.