Ply

recorded at the CND in Pantin 17 October 2014

ly results from the collaboration of Yuval Pick and Ashley Fure.

In 2016, Yuval Pick revisits the piece by reorganizing the dynamic. With a new cast and an extensive punctuation of the sound by the movement, he reveals the musicality and the humanity of the piece.

As he did in both No play hero (2012) and loom (2014), in Ply Yuval Pick continues his exploration of movement to contemporary American music: he strips down its many layers, deconstructing them in order to re-deploy their essential structures … Having distilled this process down to a sort of pure choreographic “marrow,” he now begins classifying movement according to new configurations, moving them in mirror patterns, transferring them from one dancer to another, reversing their directions, exposing them to continual variation, in which they will be executed in different rhythms or from different points of view … 

loom was a duo organized according to two principal polarities: breathing in and out, giving and receiving. These movements originating at the center of the body, are — in Ply – prolonged to the very edges of the kinesphere (the space around the body which is reachable with fully extended arms or legs). The exchange between two individuals opens out into a wider space, with more complex movements, also expanding to include five dancers.

As in No play hero and loom, Ply was created to American music. But in this case the collaboration between Yuval Pick and the composer Ashley Fure was conceived as if it were a score for four hands. Working from the blank page of the empty stage, the two artists invented a movement and sound lab, each proposing material which would be organized in various strata or layers, all of which would communicate with each other, through their analogies as well as through their counterpoints and tensions. The space between the dancers in Ply and the silences in Ashley Fure’s music are very important in the work: the dance and the acoustic composition are almost in danger here, to the point of rupture or a fall.

Ply begins with several “grains” of music, with the dispersed solitude of dancers moving, each in his or her own space. These grains begin to multiply, to combine, extending … the bodies of the dancers begin brushing against each other, being aware of each other, prolonging their respective movements. Next, a few couples, then a group, begin discreetly echoing, furtively exchanging shapes, linking to each other in fragmentary attempts. At the individual as well as at the collective level, Yuval Pick creates onstage obstacles to uniformity, seeking other ways of being together, so that when there is indeed a unified form, this neither here-nor-there of relationships plays out in bursts, starts, oscillations, irregular movements … resonating with each other, creating links which neither erase or cancel out the uniqueness of each body in the space, its inventiveness open wide. Through dance, Ply asks an important question: how to create common spaces; how to create a group without losing either one’s individuality or subjectivity.

Jean-Emmanuel Denave