Visual: {reward_system_0976} and {sincere_communication_3343) © Sofia Crespo
     

In a few words

   

Béla is a co-creation by Claire Croizé and Etienne Guilloteau for five dancers and four musicians, in collaboration with Ictus Ensemble and will premiere during the season 2025-2026. The aim is to emphasize the power of movement and the power of music over the body. The driving force will be Béla Bartók's explosive Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Speculating on Bartók's very particular approach to the form of the "Nocturne", we work on the contemporary redefinition of the idea of "Nature": no longer an idealized Other that serves as a matter of contemplation - and exploitation - of a little gentleman called Human, but a vast space of negotiation between all Earthlings, teeming with gestures, noises and complex interactions.
   

Power and chaos 
(the first movement)

   
For the new creation, we were looking for a highly percussive composition, made up of complex accents and rhythms that was musically powerful: music full of life, that triggers the dance. For the past ten years, ECCE’s choreography has been generous both in its physicality and in the commitment it demands of the dancers, while preserving the precision and articulation of the movements. Working on the musicality of movement is an integral part of their choreographic language. This search led to Béla Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1938), which was one of the pieces in the founding repertoire of Ictus. In this powerful, explosive piece, the material is constantly shuffled and reconfigured. The Sonata, which lasts around 25 minutes, will be the centrepiece of a wider selection of musical works.

Right from the start, you're caught up in the musical progress, as it moves through ruptures and variations. The first movement oscillates between abstraction and a total unleashing of power; it is very danceable, despite its sometimes dizzying speed and abrupt interruptions. The whole movement buzzes with echoes, imitations from one instrument to another, canons and fugatos - for in Bartók, everything is constantly scattered and multiplied. Very rhapsodic, this first movement puts forward an abundance of organic life. It evokes the almost chaotic thrust of life through the density of its rhythmic, melodic and sonic themes. The dance should join this density and vitality. It should unfold in space along the exchanges between pianos and percussion, so that the stage literally embodies this bursting in energy of the first movement and gives expression to the very idea of multitude. This multitude will be represented by the evocation of various forms of dance - quite in the same way as Bartók evoked, in his compositions, the inexhaustible treasure of the music of the peoples.

Bartók blurs the boundary between melodic instruments and indeterminate-sounding percussion. In many places, the percussion gives life to the inert sound of the pianos, appropriating their too-quickly-vanished resonance. Elsewhere, in a strange oscillation, the pianos are no more than a rustle, a vibration, like a cymbal or a tam-tam.
   

A few words about Bartók

The figure of Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was highly controversial during his lifetime, but the friendship he enjoyed with many of his contemporaries is still very much alive.The popularity of his music continues to grow among the new generations of listeners. For a hundred years, his music has always seemed to look us straight in the eye, full of loyalty and empathy. It is as distant from the "fin de siècle" spirit of Viennese music, as from the sarcastic modernism of Stravinsky. Bartók was a firm believer in the possibility of building one fraternal world. "The happiest days of my life were those I spent in the villages, among the peasants", he wrote. He spoke ten languages and, with his team of collaborators, collected over 7,000 folk songs from Eastern Europe and Turkey, giving birth to ethnomusicology. With Bartók, wrote philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, "morning consciousness has conjured the enchantments of twilight". Bartók came to be seen as popular not only because he used folk music, but because the dry, slightly sharp edges of his music evokes a certain peasant-like attitude, a beauty without manners, a frankness that the bourgeois classes would have been incapable of.
( Note by Jean-Luc Plouvier)
   

A new "night" and a new "nature"

(the second movement)
   
The second movement is highly original, and speaks with great freshness to contemporary ears. It belongs to that typically Bartokian category of "night music". Bartók's "night" is suggested in a very materialistic way by a dreamy, restless, suspended musical quality, listening with a sense of suspense: the world of the open air, the world of animals and plants, begins to rustle in all directions in the darkness. Insects and birds swarm in this second movement, calling for all kinds of musical, scenic, sonic and extra-musical developments - for example, games with bird calls or percussive sound effects performed by all the performers. When working with older repertoire, we always ask ourselves how this composition can resonate nowadays. The key is to open up the Sonata form, taking inspiration from the second movement: Bartók revives the old musical form of the Nocturne, and thus overcomes the now obsolete category of romantic "Nature", motionless under the moon. Think of Bruno Latour: we don't live on earth, we live in the heart of the earth. There is no such thing as a separate world called Nature: there is only a common nature, which is up to us to compose.
   
###About virtuosity
(the third movement)
   
The final movement offers an exhilarating conclusion to the Sonata. What interests us here is the determination of the music, which moves from shadow to light, from the almost chaotic profusion of the first movement to the solar beauty of the finale. The composition demands the utmost precision in its interpretation, which in turn calls for great concentration among the musicians on stage. It's all about virtuosity, a real question for us, which we'd like to embrace at the heart of our own discipline.

Discredited by a certain (ill-considered) practice of conceptualization in art, the notion of virtuosity enables us to approach the type of intelligence shared by humans and animals; this intelligence is not only ordered by logos and memory, but engages the whole body in the present. It's the "cunning of intelligence", as Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant put it, where:

flair, sagacity, foresight, flexibility of mind, feinting, resourcefulness, a sense of opportunity, various skills, long experience [mingles]; it applies to moving, disconcerting and ambiguous realities, which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous reasoning
(M. Detienne, J.P. Vernat, La Mètis des Grecs, quoted by Catherine Malabou, Métamorphoses de l'intelligence.)
   

Saying through gesture

   
ECCE’s choreographic pieces are always composed of several layers. Since the creation of EVOL (2016), they work with poetic or philosophical texts, which they ask the dancers to trans-literalize into movement. It is very interesting what musicality emerges from the dancer's when they "say" words with their bodies without entering into mime or narration. Using texts to generate some of the choreographic material helped to free the imagination. Not only do the texts nourish the body, but also the dramaturgy of the piece. It is still undecided which text(s) will be used for Béla. In the past, they've worked on Rilke's Duino Elegies for EVOL (2016) and Flowers (we are) (2019); on Cesare Pavese's Dialogues avec Leuco for Pole Reports from Space (2019), Duet for two string trios (2021) and Fabula (2023); on Ovide and René Char for Retour amont: le rêve (2021); on the lyrics of Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde for Our solo (2023).
   
###The team
    
In this piece we are bringing together different generations of dancers: Claire Godsmark (1978), with whom we've been working for a long time, will share the stage with younger generations represented by Anne-Laure Dogot (1988), Cintia Sebök (1995) and Laure de Dietrich (2001).

While ECCE has been working together with pianist, conductor and musical dramaturge Alain Franco(*) since 2013, the collaboration with Ictus started in 2020 with a piece for two dancers and two pianists: Retour Amont. This production came to serve as the foundation for a larger scale work in 2021, based on the idea of the utopian body: Retour Amont : le rêve.

For the Bartók Sonata in this production, Jean-Luc Plouvier and Alain Franco are joined by Tom De Cock and Gerrit Nulens on percussion.

(*) But ECCE’s collaborations with pianist, conductor and musical dramaturge Alain Franco goes back much further! In 2013 they created Synopsis of a battle (with the support of CCN de Rillieux La Pape) and, in 2010, Tres Scripturae (with the support of Kunstenfestivaldesarts). The piano has been integral throughout ECCE’s artistic journey from the start, no doubt because of its intimate connotations, and the singular relationship that can be established between the piano and the dancer's body. The pieces performed/mixed by Alain Franco ranged from Debussy to Elliott Carter, via Boulez and Stockhausen.

Claire Croizé, Etienne Guilloteau