Vocabulary of need

Today, I would like to confront a major work in the history of music, Bach’s Partita in D minor, BWV 1004. When I listened to this universal, timeless piece, I was touched and inspired by its emotional force. As a contemporary artist and choreographer, I would like to offer my dancers and the audience an encounter with this music, an opportunity to connect to something bigger, something spiritual.
The American violinist Joshua Bell described it as “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It is a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally overwhelming, structurally perfect.”  
The Murimor project album, initiated by the musicologist Helga Thoene and violinist Christoph Poppen in collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble intrigues me in its approach. This artistic project aims to reveal latent messages ingrained in the Partita by interspersing its movements with hidden chorales quotations.       
Their appetite and interest in unveiling secret information, digging into the music’s core, stimulate my creative research.

Through my dance and with my dancers, I will explore various ways to feel and live this music. I am interested as well in rearranging this music matter for finding different ways to perceive it.  My choreographic research will focus on the tension between central axis and displacements. The body frees itself from its verticality by creating asymmetrical situations and multidirectional paths. It is seeking for connection, looking for (re)constructing with others and reinventing space.     I would like to work with 9 dancers, to have a larger group than in my previous pieces. It will enable me to create simultaneous situations, superposed images and chaotic trajectories. Through its vitality, this group of dancers will intensify and amplify the points of convergence and the vanishing lines created in space.  These multiple aspired and emerged movements in continual conversation with the sonic matter will develop an orchestral language. The desire to create something larger will be crystallized in this fleeting embrace between dance and music.    

Yuval Pick – January 2019