IN YOUR HEAD

Pol Pi & Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop

What happens in a musician’s body when she plays? How does the music invest the bodies, going through them – making them vibrate, move, act, echoing through the instrument, this object at the same time inert and alive: the instrument? The interpreter plays, the interpreter dances, an inner, concentrated, precise dance, most often invisible to the eye, except for what appears on the surface – technical gestures, twitching of the limbs, facial expressions. With the intuition of exposing this embodied music, the choreographer Pol Pi, a trained musician who has long practiced the viola, started from two revealing points. On the one hand, Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8: a testamentary work that Shostakovich composed 15 years after the Second World War as a “requiem to himself”. The theme, built from his initials (D – Es – C – H), acts as a ghost that hovers over the music – carrying the shadows of the war and oppressions that he suffered throughout his career.

A second starting point for this work lies in Pol Pi’s encounter with Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, a Berlin-based group dedicated to experimenting with instrumental music by exploring the body and the stage. In the company of four musicians, Sophie Notte and Isabelle Klemt on cello, Anna Faber and Mia Bodet on violin, and Yodfat Miron on viola, Pol Pi sought to extract the essence of their intimate, daily, conflicting or passionate relationship to music and their instruments, by drawing a series of portraits that resonate with the score. The score is respected to the letter, guiding each breath, the inflection of a finger or the movement of a limb, and acts as an intermediary between the language of the notes and that of the bodies – between Shostakovich’s preoccupations and those of the present. In this crossed path between staves and gestures, solo and quartet, silence and the rhythm that links them, a whole subtle choreography unfolds, giving us the opportunity to see the music as well as to hear the movement. 


Gilles Amalvi


Conception and artistic direction: Pol Pi
Creation: Anna Faber (violin), Mia Bodet (violin), Yodfat Miron (viola), Sophie Notte (cello) and Isabelle Klemt (cello)

Performance: Anna Faber (violin), Mia Bodet (violin), Yodfat Miron (viola) and Isabelle Klemt (cello)

Dramaturgy: Gilles Amalvi

Light creation and luminous objects design: Rima Ben Brahim

Costumes creation: La Bourette, assisted by Lucie Lizen

Sound control: Baptiste Chatel

Outside eye: Boram Lie


Production: Sarah Becher
Production: NO DRAMA & Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop

Executive production: Latitudes Prod. – Lille

Coproductions: Montpellier Danse ; CCNO – Centre chorégraphique National d’Orléans ; Fonds Transfabrik – Fonds franco-allemand pour le spectacle vivant ; CCN – Ballet National de Marseille ; Centre national de danse contemporaine d’Angers ; centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie, dans le cadre de l’Accueil-studio/Ministère de la Culture ; Centre chorégraphique national de Rillieux-la-Pape, direction Yuval PICK, dans le cadre du dispositif Accueil-Studio ; Festival NEXT ; BUDA Kunstencentrum Courtrai ; PACT / Zollverein Essen

Project funded by the Federal Government German Federal Cultural Foundation Commissioner for Culture and the Media; The Senate Department for Culture and Europe Berlin , Fonds Transfabrik – Fonds franco-allemand pour le spectacle vivant. The project is supported by la Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations.

NO DRAMA is supported by a structural funding by la DRAC Île-de-France.
 Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop is funded by The Senate Department for Culture and Europe Berlin.

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Thanks to: Nitsan Margaliot, Josephine Boivineau, Léa Gallet, Anaïs Fornes, Caroline Lefèvre, Elisa Hernandez, Juan Pablo Landazuri, Yi-Wei Wang, Amandine Lesca, Lucas Soares, Alina Tskhovrebova, Muriel Garric, Paul Grassin and Louise Phelipon.

Photos © Valentina Benigni
Teaser: Alex Krupp with images by Tomas Cali dos Anjos