Figure de voisinages

Other Faces

The pianist Alain Franco and dancer and choreographer Jean Luc Ducourt are presenting an interpretation of the Goldberg Variations. In their own words, ‘This Bach cycle is built up around a single aria, which functions as the ‘hardware’ for the whole work. Bach composed thirty variations on the aria, so the question we asked was: if the aria is the reference point, how are we to understand the variation? We started thinking in terms of ‘visage’ and ‘voisinage du visage’ (‘face’ and ‘proximity of the face’): so the variation is everything that changes in what one recognises; it is the Other Face.’