FR

Focus: Les Gestes

Photo: Michael Slobodian. Performers: Soula Trougakos and Elinor Frey.

Choreographer Isabelle Van Grimde and composers Sean Ferguson and Marlon Schumacher take the dialogue between dance and music to new heights in the choreography-concert Les Gestes.

Performers: Soula Trougakos and Sophie Breton.

On stage, an unexpected string quartet made up of two musicians and two dancers equipped with digital musical instruments developed at the IDMIL (Input Devices and Music Interaction Laboratory), which embrace and extend the body. This new generation of instruments enables dancers and musicians to control sound synthesis and act on live musical processing.

Photo: Michael Slobodian. Performers: Marjolaine Lambert and Sophie Breton.

Nourished by the body's most elementary impulses, gesture captures music, spatializes it and transforms it. This project follows on from our first collaboration on Duo pour un violoncelle et un danseur (2008), in which live music was captured, transformed and spatialized by the performers using a musical instrument called the T-Stick.

Photo: Michael Slobodian. Performer: Soula Trougakos.

With this piece, technological innovation is once again placed at the service of art, opening up a new world of perception to the public, offering new ways of entering a work and new keys to understanding the body and the music. Never before have interactions between dancers and musicians been so refined, so visceral and so magical. A unique sensory experience that blurs boundaries to exalt the combined powers of music and dance.

Photo: Michael Slobodian. Performer: Sophie Breton.

Artistic Team

Artistic director and choreographer: Isabelle Van Grimde

Musical director: Sean Ferguson

Created with and performed by: Sophie Breton, Soula Trougakos

Violin: Marjolaine Lambert

Cello: Elinor Frey

Composers: Sean Ferguson, Marlon Schumacher

Additional music: Geof Holbrook

Lights: Bruno Rafie

Costumes: Pascale Bassani

Director of research and development: Marcelo Wanderley

Instrument designers and developers: Joseph Malloch, Ian Hattwick, Marlon Schumacher

Computer designer: Eliot Britton, Marlon Schumacher

Research assistant: Anthony Piciacchia


Created by Van Grimde Corps Secrets in coproduction with CIRMMT - Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology, IDMIL, Agora de la danse, Concertgebouw Bruges, Schouwburg Arnhem and Forum Blanc-Mesnil. A co-presentation of live@ CIRMMT.