The choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has always demonstrated her taste for music performed live, notably that for violin or solo cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, a composer to whom the Belgian is closely linked – she composed other ballets based on his Goldberg Variations or his Brandenburg Concertos in particular.
She thus, in 2017, choreographed the Six Suites for solo cello BWV 1007-1012, after her meeting with the cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras who, like any practitioner of this instrument, had known them since his youth and had made a wonderful recording of them , ten years earlier, for Harmonia Mundi. The Frenchman made his own the skills of old-fashioned playing, said to be “historically informed”, while playing an instrument, certainly strung with gut, but with a modern bow and spade (an accessory added during the 1830s), as well as he does it in the film Dialogue with Bach offered by Arte.
The program – interspersed with interventions by Keersmaeker and Queyras – takes extracts from the original show, but completely recomposes its subject by filming it on a set, without an audience, associating in a subtly fluid way the camera movements of Corentin Leconte with those of the five dancers (including Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, 63, who appears during a solo, a duet and the final quintet on the Sixth Suite, heard in its entirety).
Queyras says he was fascinated, in Keersmaeker, by “the deep connection between the musical structure and the structure of the language that it linked”. The choreographer says she returns to Bach, “always structured without being systematic”, because “everything is anchored in human experience” and there is always “dance and movement” in his music.
Fruitful interaction
What is interesting, in this way of making choreographic and musical gestures coexist in real time, is that the two do not seem linked by the usual synchronization constraints and are expressed in a sort of shared rubato. Fruitful interaction confirmed by the choreographer: “Jean-Guihen influences our way of dancing. We make decisions in the moment, and that’s fun! »
However, the movements of the two parties are properly concerted and one could even think that they agree on occasion with the geometric figures traced on the ground, which the camera sometimes films from above and which one could take for a choreography notation or a cosmogonic plan. Which would not be surprising from Keersmaeker who admits “a fascination with geometry, the circle, the spiral, gravitational waves”.
And there are these very beautiful moments, when the dancers lie down and seem caught in one of those sleeps that baroque opera is full of, conducive to dreams, to phantasmagoria. In the “Sarabande” of the Sixth Suite, are these immobile bodies peaceful sleepers? Survivors or victims washed up on the shore? Glorious bodies at rest (after all, Queyras and Keersmaeker see this sequel as a “Resurrection”)? Intriguing mystery.