So Schnell

With all its advantages and drawbacks, “commissioning” is enjoying new favor in contemporary art. By creating “So Schnell” (1990) for the inauguration of the Montpellier Corum, Dominique Bagouet has followed in this tradition, once held in such high esteem by Roland Barthes. The Groundrule: to come to grips with a vast, spectacular space. Bagouet plays the game while ignoring the rules, turning this experience into a work of energy and resistance. With the collaboration of twelve dancers.

As opposed to the company’s usual artistic bent, the details here are meant to serve the totality (but a totality which still accomodates the perfection of detail). They work toward spaciousness, not as dimension but rather as emotion. A combative form of dance, setting in motion new forward thrusts, new deployments. A multi-faceted form of dance, in blasts, in outpourings, in flames. With variations in scale and temperature. Between the confidence of a dancer inventing his gestures and the forward march toward the audience of a well-ordered battalion. Between the momentum of a gallop and the apparent calm of an opening duo, a muted detonator in which the artist-meteor implodes. Sensual, moving matter. In the words of the choreographer : “Desire is our motor force”.

And because he wants to give the dance a strong, distinguishing mark, he imagines the swelling of contour found in Pop Art, in Lichtenstein or Rosenquist. This careful engraver of “elusive” dances traces a lively work in stark outline. All the while insisting on the near-mechanical duplication of motifs. Consistent with the “meteorology” of this dance-landscape, Christine Le Moigne has constructed a mobile overhanging frieze of alternating clouds, suns, rays and storms, like a heavenly weather forecast chart. Using the five primary colours, Dominique Fabrègue has created simplistic costumes, purposely lacking detail.

The choreographer then introduces revealing, meaningful sounds out of his memory. Bach first of all, accentuated, rhythmic as a heartbeat. And the Cantata BWV 26, climatic, that too, with its swelling of volume, of intensity, its subtle effects. In the simplicity of a version pre-dating current restorations. “So fast”…, ”so schnell”… how the German language sighs since the long-gone days of Baroque “vanities”! Is it a simple complaint against the passing of time? Today’s artist can translate it in urgent terms, with an impatience to challenge despondency.

Using a smaller number of dancers, the work proceeds on two levels, collective and intimate, group and individual, with occasional flashes of oblique allegory. And Bagouet continues to explore his autobiography of the soul, woven like nerve-tissue in a network of gesture. There is also a metallic undertow of knitting machines, recorded at his family factory. Inarticulate murmuring like a language without words, buried in memory. Childhood noises beating out of the rhythm of his lost steps. Telling of that which the choreographic act brings alive in each of us: the interior cartography that a forgotten “mark” never stops engraving. Retracing the indelible journey carried in our bodies.

Source: Laurence Louppe –  Octobre 1992