THE ART OF THE
DANCE-FUGUE

Year & Context

2016/17

In the context of the ido Organ Festival Düsseldorf

About the Production

In 1751, Johann Sebastian Bach published his final work: “The Art of the Fugue”. Counterpoint for four voices – strict, unrelenting, complete. What was considered antiquated at the time, an old-fashioned craft that the expressive early Classical era had long outgrown, proved in the years that followed to be exactly the opposite: a model. For the Romantics and above all for modernism, for anyone who wanted to understand how individual voices could become a collective without the individual disappearing into it. Bach is, with good reason, also called the Shakespeare of music.

We have never been interested in «dancing to» music. We all know what that looks like: the dancers illustrate what the notes prescribe, crescendo becomes a lift, the rest becomes a freeze. The result is pictorial illustration – alien to both music and dance. What drew us to Bach’s «Art of the Fugue» was something different: to apply the contrapuntal techniques themselves as choreographic procedure. Canon, inversion, stretto, Dux and Comes, subject and countersubject – not as metaphor, but as structure of movement.

Four bodies. Two women, two men. A four-voice instrumentation of Bach’s, translated into flesh and movement. The voices are not interchangeable – each carries its own weight: solos, duets, trios, and the full four-part statement of the quartet as collective. Who carries, who leads, who follows, who dissents – these are not merely choreographic decisions, they are statements about the relationship between individual and society. The fugue does not answer this question. It holds it in motion.

The evening is in three parts. It begins in musical silence: only movement sounds, breath, the soft friction of shoes on the floor. Sound as by-product of the body. Then: electronic composition, distilled from the rhythms of Bach. Finally, the organ takes up Bach’s word – live, in what is essentially a sacred space, one that romanticises nothing and promises nothing but acoustics and concentration on counterpoint rendered consistently into movement. The dance adds a four-bodied counterpoint to the sound. Or: the sound plays counterpoint with the dancers, who are themselves behaving contrapuntally towards one another.

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Düsseldorf, the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the Förderverein Klangtheater e.V. In cooperation with the International Düsseldorf Organ Festival (ido).