Histoire d'une transmission, So schnell à l'opéra

Marie-Hélène Rebois films two logics clash in the history of transmission guided by the original performers.

At the request of Brigitte Lefèvre who wished to include So Schnell, one of Dominique Bagouet’s last choreographies, in the repertoire of the Opéra Garnier, the Les Carnets Bagouet team set to work with the Opéra dancers. Marie-Hélène Rebois films two logics that confront each other in this story of transmission guided by the original interpreters. 

How to communicate the experience required to bring about each gesture in the rightness of its relationship to oneself, to others, to space and to sounds? How to transmit without feeling bereft and without fearing that the essential has been lost? The words of Olivia Grandville, who was a dancer at the Opéra before joining Les Carnets Bagouet, of Matthieu Doze, Annabelle Pulcini and Hélène Cathala, testify to this major difficulty. Accustomed to integrating techniques and choreographies in record time, the Opéra dancers know how to quickly copy what they are taught. Matching what is both a fault and a quality with the requirement to interpret, which is at the heart of contemporary dance, is a challenge that Les Carnets Bagouet have taken up here with great generosity.

Fabienne Arvers

Impressive but never monumental, and with sweeps of the paintbrush throwing bright colours through space, never hesitating to introduce a lone female dancer onto the bare and silent stage, here is, as it appears to us, the writing of So Schnell. More fragile, and, to a certain extent, more flat – like the settings of Christine Le Moigne, inspired by Roy Lichtenstein – than the second version, this first So Schnell yet already contains within it the same ambition: to create an immense dance where each interpreter, nevertheless, has their place; let the “space be invaded by forces that leave some traces” (D. Bagouet), while at the same time chiselling this great construction with profound details, worthy of a great goldsmith.

Source : Isabelle Ginot