At PanM360, we love music (obviously). Music for its own sake, of course, but also music in its relationship with other arts. We don’t often take the time to revisit dance or theatre performances with an important music presence, simply due to scheduling and availability reasons. But if the opportunity arises, we are more than happy to do so.
Last night, I attended Sol Invictus by the Franco-Algerian choreographer Hervé Koubi. In this masterful creation (which means ‘’Sun undefeated’’), which Koubi describes as an ode to life, gestures and movements from contemporary urban culture, such as Breakdance, Hip Hop, and Brazilian capoeira, are combined with dazzling virtuosity. Contemporary dance is also grafted onto it, in an ultra-modern, but also baroque and choral, ballet propelled a thousand miles from the dark, gloomy and dirty clichés associated with street culture.
Koubi is right when he talks about an ode to life. He also mentions the joy of children dancing. There is indeed a youthful vital force in this explosion of solar and unifying energy.
Let’s first talk about the dancers, of fabulous beauty in their prominent bodies and almost aerial malleability. Bodies that almost never stop spinning, that fall to the ground like soft fabric, without a bump or heaviness, that transform without apparent transition into gymnasts, circus artists, a spinning top and a modern performer with studied and learnt gestures. Koubi went to find the best, he says. No doubt about it.
All of this could have been a bluff to impress the well-to-do bourgeois who are superficially tuned into street culture. If it’s much more than that (and it is), it’s certainly thanks to the music that soundtracks the movements.
Over an uninterrupted nest of about 75-80 minutes, Koubi’s choreography breathes and evolves through several states of mind and as many allegories that ultimately form a complete narrative construction. A construction which sometimes leaves room for interpretation because the discourse is generally more symbolic than explicit, inviting the more thoughtful to engage in hermeneutics and the rest of us to primarily enjoy the audio-visual aesthetics of the moment.
Be that as it may, varied emotional time spaces follow one another but, above all, balance each other throughout the show. Beethoven (Seventh Symphony) brings a dramatic force for a few minutes, a kind of gravity that contrasts with other hyper-festive moments, supported by powerful music made of tribal rhythms, rumbling brass, and very effective staccato strings. Elsewhere, it is the mediaeval Hildegard of Bingen and her angelic vocal hymns that grant the group of about fifteen dancers a kind of spiritual elevation that seems to make them float above the asphalt. Some excerpts from the music of the film Midsommar by Bobby Krtic flesh out and link the visual with an intangible sensory experience. And then, in between all of that, a relatively soaring and ambient electronic backdrop, abstract (signed by Mikael Karlsson (collaborator of Lykke Li, Alicia Keys) and Maxime Dobson), like a sound bed from which the mentioned pieces and some others regularly emerge, like spontaneous manifestations of enlightened human communion.
At the beginning and end of the show, Steve Reich (propulsive Music for 18 Musicians, almost a stereotype in this kind of proposal) serves as an expressive tool to paint a picture of virtuosity that gives the impression of being orchestrated with perfect precision. And yet, when we know that Koubi does not “count,” and prefers, as in jazz or other improvised music, to identify precise (musical) cues between which the artists on stage are given a certain freedom, we can only be amazed by the overall cohesion of these exceptional bodies, capable of astonishing individuality, but which perfectly submit to a collective and holistic vision.
Danse Danse
Beyond the fluttering physical movements, which are constantly impressive, the staging occasionally uses, with a pleasant sense of imagery, a few artifices such as a large golden sheet, illuminated by appropriate lighting (the Sun, of course), which transforms into a dazzling whirlwind when placed on one of the dancers (one-legged!) in the middle of a human top spin. In another beautiful allegory, a dancer dresses himself with said golden ‘’fleece’’ to appear as a sort of luminous Apollo god. Elsewhere, sparklers (I think?) timidly illuminate a few dancers in total darkness, a rare absence of the sun god in favour of the night. It’s simple, but beautiful.
Sol Invictus is magnificent, aesthetically, and emotionally memorable. We return without hesitation, both to relive moments of great artistic strength, but also to delve even deeper into the understanding of this spectacle rich in symbols and significance.
