The Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach form a musical score often revisited by choreographers. This music contains dances : minuets, jigs, sarabands, passepieds… I hear them, see them, sense them by the way the harpsichord pinches the strings to make these old sounds resonate. I also hear the modernity of its construction and the force of its structure.
If I let my imagination wander, the music lets me see gestures and stories. The gestures are those that others made long ago, traces left to be followed again, but equally gestures to come, that we in turn generate to offer stories of today.
When I listen to the music through my body and through movement, I am seized by the rhythm, the nuances, the colors, the shifts, the attacks, the jolts. If my listening is emotional, joy and melancholy entwine, a sensation of space and opening are tuned to a more intimate relationship. Through the bodies and the gestures, the space that we have imagined to hear these variations can change volume, and the floor can open up under the pressure that the dancers' steps invent.
Beyond what each variation generates and stimulates, what inspires me is to try to hear what appears as a story, as fiction, in the intervals that the musical structure excavates from one variation to the next. I attempt to weave the unprecedented story that these free spaces offer my imagination.
The performance of Madeleine Fournier, Teresa Silva and David Marques is tuned to that of Blandine Ranou ; together they weave a subtle dialog, nourished by the precision of a long, shared attention. They don't follow each other, don't wait for each other, but take the risk of traveling together through a history that is bigger than themselves, taken as an ancient path, without worrying about where it leads.
Loïc Touzé