You could watch French choreographer Maud Le Pladec’s show and easily miss a key fact: the 10 performers on stage are not always listening to the same music we are.
The score for the work is by British composer Pete Harden, based on Schubert’s unfinished Symphony No 8. It’s as if that piece of music has been put through a mincer, coming out a bit fudgey, a bit stringy; one note stuck in a drone followed by surges of melody.
But for the first movement, the dancers, wearing earpieces, are only hearing a “blueprint” based on the symphony’s opening motif, what Harden calls “the DNA” of the music. Sometimes the audience hears the same, sometimes we don’t. The effect it has on our experience of the dance is not exactly clear.
The idea for this piece comes from Swiss conceptual artist Rémy Zaugg’s 27 Esquisses Perceptives (27 Perceptive Sketches), where he broke down the elements of a Cézanne painting, describing its constituent parts. Le Pladec – who’s not well known here, but is director of the National Choreographic Centre of Orléans – offers her own deconstruction of sorts. The dance shifts in and out of sympathy with the score, sometimes moving in concert, sometimes everybody doing their own thing. The 10 dancers will be off on their own paths then a woman briefly curves in line with a horn part, or the whole cast suddenly alight on the same phrase, or land at the end of a sentence together.
Against the sounds of reconstituted Schubert, the movement has a casual mood, matching the slouchy jersey of the dancers’ athleisure outfits. It feels as if they’re marking the steps sometimes with soft knees and an improvisatory feel. It’s like a less rigorous version of Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker; comme ci, comme ça.
At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 31 October
