© Catherine Alvès
Olga de Soto’s work focuses on intimacy and introspection. She uses solos to plunge her performers into essential phases of isolation before letting them grow into characters. The choreographer likes to carve out the rustlings of a tactile music, in which silence precedes and engages our perception. To pick up such sound illusions we must increase the profundity with which we listen. Working with a music that pushes instrumental possibilities to their extreme limits, Olga de Soto seeks an intensity of listening and to interrogate the thought that precedes and accompanies all movement.
Frank Madlener, IRCAM
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In Éclats Mats, I continue the work of reflection and analysis that I began in 1996, around movement. One of the starting points of this work is the study of different action verbs and their groupings of meanings. This tool is already present in my work in a more or less palpable way, for example in the solo Murmurs ('to find' a position / a gesture / a trace / a movement…), in Strumentale ('to breath' / 'to not breathe'), in Seuls bruits des corps entre eux ('to appear', 'to disappear', 'to graze', 'to rub', 'to fling'), in … rhizomes… (for example, in the first scene: 'to move about', 'to lean', 'to take', 'to hold', 'to compress', 'to stay').
These different works address the question of the intention of movement while studying the motors of bodily action, even if the public would not perceive the movement in its motor meaning. Through this approach, I wanted to touch on a possible "semantics" of movement, internal and subjective, which would serve to define the subtext of our journeys, but which would remain buried and invisible.
Part of the physical work searches for the other in us, or the traces of oneself in the other. It is this other, absent, that has shaped the presences of the four people who share the space-time in this performance. We have explored the memory of those traces and wondered how the contact, the supports, the visual, tactile and sound observation of the other's body could reveal to us our own.
There is a subterranean work about the possibilities and non-possibilities of the movement's sense, of the dance which constructs itself in the project. Thus, the question of what we give and what we don't give to see imposes itself throughout the process. There is also the distance that we have to make the audience travel to lead them 'to see', which is an entire path that it is build up little by little during the whole performance.
One of my desires is to continue to explore the body in movement and to take stock of this dance, to assume my desire to continue dancing. But it is also a question of taking a new look at my relationship to contemporary music, freeing my dance from what may have seemed to be "becoming one" with the music, freeing myself from this "giving the music 'to be seen'", which was at the heart of pieces such as Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (1996). In this way, I wish to affirm my relationship to music not as a relationship of accompaniment, where the creative gesture is directly linked to the musical composition, but rather as a confrontation of two parallel reflections, two experiences of time and space, a simultaneity that calls for sight and hearing.
This creation has also been an opportunity to deepen my encounter with violist Garth Knox, continuing the experience of playing with musicians on stage, that I already sketched out during the creation of Paumes in 1997.
Finally, there is the will to continue the dialogue that I have established since 1997 between my work and the work of the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, from whom I have previously choreographed the following works: Sei quartetti brevi, All'aure in una lontananza and Canzona di ringraziamento. The compositions that accompany us this time are Tre notturni brillanti and Ai limiti della notte, both for viola.
Sciarrino's work could be qualified as post-modern; it seeks in some ways to reinvent the instrument's sonorities, trying to define a sound territory of its own. The Tre notturni brillanti embody this sonorous world: not a single note is played "normally", everything is a whirlwind of harmonics, trills, tremolos and jetés, an instrumental tightrope number performed at lightning speed. Sciarrino's instrumental techniques push the natural characteristics of the instrument to its limits.
For Garth Knox, the music of Salvatore Sciarrino presents a "specificity": the extreme reduction of the sound level in proportion to the degree of energy invested. This specificity has defined a very concrete way of working; starting on a vast scale of activity and progressively diminishing the dimensions of the action, the scope and the length of the movement, while still attempting to keep the intensity of the result. This work has brought forth a state of intensive listening (born from concentration), which is the passkey to Sciarrino' music.
Olga de Soto, 2001