Noé Soulier / CNDC Angers & Maude Gratton Close Up

In film, a close-up is a camera shot that isolates a part of the body. A change in scale that Noé Soulier experiments with in this piece for 6 performers, bringing a fresh take to onstage filmed choreography. The image enables us to get up close with the bodies while giving them architectural proportions. By juxtaposing two types of choreography – one for the physical space of the stage and the other for the space of projection – Noé Soulier combines several scenes that can interact differently with the music. Performed by the 5 musicians of Maude Gratton’s il Convito ensemble, Bach’s contrapuntal pieces display an abstract polyphonic construction while remaining very expressive. That is the tension Noé Soulier explores to probe the complex and polyphonic convolutions of our personal experiences – from the most intense to the most insignificant – which never follow a simple or linear narrative.

The dance vocabulary used in Close Up draws upon improvisation and navigates through abstraction, emotion and meaning. To that end, the choreographer utilizes practical actions like catching, dodging, hitting or throwing and diverts them from their original purpose. Multiple distortions make it impossible to recognize those actions, but they still retain an emotional charge and eventually assume an expressive quality. Close Up focuses in on the gap between movement and fiction, in line with Soulier’s work over the last ten years where theoretical thinking involves practice deeply rooted in movement as well as singular scenic devices. 
 

Vincent Théval

Close Up est une pièce aussi inventive qu’émouvante, fuyant toute abstraction pour nous plonger au cœur de ce que le chorégraphe appelle une polyphonie d’affects. Noé Soulier invité de l'émission Affaires culturelles / France Culture, le 17/6/24 → Écouter