My downstairs neighbor, who is of a thrifty persuasion, very often makes his little sprites oatmeal for breakfast – I’ve seen the battered tin pot on his stove, dried-up oatmeal stuck on it. I know when he’s making the stuff – he calls it "porridge" – because our walls are pretty acoustical and he has a peculiar way of tap-scraping the pot in order to knock the last batch of dried-up oatmeal into the new batch: tap-tap-skrishhh.
Hearing that tap-tap-skrishhh sound wakes up a lot of feeling, in me, in the sprites, too, probably in their mother, still abed, probably in her thrifty husband.
As the neighbor stirs the oats, mood, experience and image bubble thick in all the brains around.
My brain, the sprites’ brains, probably the neighbor’s brain, make the sound of oatmeal a soundtrack of our personal movies.
I tell myself tap-tap-skrishhh is wake-up music, but it’s not music.
It’s just sound that associates to movement and feeling.
To become music, tap-tap-skrishhh needs a conjuror to grok the right pattern and choose the appropriate tools to weave that pattern with:
tap-tap-skrishhh, skrishhh, skrishhh, tap, Tap-tap a-skrishhh, skrishhh, a skrishhh, tap, skrishhh…
Along with, say, a hollow stick, plus, say, some lungs to rhythm the passage of air through the hollow of the stick.
Conjuring music is, obviously, no mean feat.
But conjuring music while teasing movement into dance seems to me not only a great feat but almost and impossible one, like building a large hadron collider or binding petroleum jelly and heavy water.
There are a few music conjurors who are also movement teasers, but not many, which makes them notable.
I’m thinking about sound and dance, conjuring music and teasing movement because, three years ago now, at Regard du Cygne, I was so struck by how naturally, artfully, powerfully, choreographer Marie Desoubeaux had bound together sound and movement in making RESTER (“Remain”), as far as I know, her first dance performance creation.
I walked out thinking RESTER was not a one-shot, not a happy accident, but that Desoubeaux had that rare knack for twining both essential arts so closely together they seemed one thing. My judgment, I thought, was certainly helped along by the art and power of dancer Margaux Amoros musician Robin Pharo.
All the same, I felt it was the “naturalness” of the apparent unity of music and dance in RESTER that upheld my judgment.
I finally saw a second Desoubeaux creation, Après tout, (“After All”) on 22 March 2022, at Théâtre de Vanves. I feel vindicated: Desoubeaux does have a natural when it comes to putting together sound and movement.
Après tout is very different to RESTER.
Where RESTER is almost purely music and movement in twilight and seen from hard benches, Après tout is almost theater.
Set in an elaborately visual pink-quartz quarry and seen from upholstered seats, Après tout has a story line and an up-to-date topic: it brings out the brief lives of its three very active performers in light of Earth abiding.
In Après tout, Desoubeaux shows, too, that she is deft with the dramatic implications of story-line, visuals and sounds – the pink quartz quarry, sound choices and characterizations work; she knows how to transform spectators into participants.
But these things show Desoubeaux is a capable movement creator, like many others. What interests me, and should interest potential spectators, is what continues to set her apart. And what sets her apart is, as I’ve said, a knack for binding sound to movement.
This knack, talent, shines through in Après tout (which Desoubeaux's notes describe as “a musical and choreographic creation”). The knack, talent, is what struck me hard in RESTER (which her notes describe as “a solo in two voices for a dancer and gambist (viol player)”): a capacity to bind two distinct arts so that they seem just one, a knack for conjuring music while simultaneously teasing movement into dance.
Put Marie Desoubeaux on your Paris dance experience bucket list.
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