Still Live

Spirits dancing to a string quartet by Lachenmann

Salva Sanchis is a young Spanish choreographer and dancer who works in Brussels. In these two capacities he has worked on several Rosas productions, including Bitches Brew/Tacoma Narrows, Desh and Raga for the Rainy Season/A Love Supreme. He also creates work of his own. In the three Rosas projects he created choreographic passages set to jazz music. For the basis of his new project he chose the second string quartet by the contemporary German composer Helmut Lachenmann: Reigen Seliger Geister (The Dance of the Blessed Spirits).

Lachenmann does not see a string quartet as an ensemble of four instruments but as a single super-instrument with sixteen strings. In the same way, Salva Sanchis considers that the three dancers on stage form a single entity with the space around them. His choreography comprises an exploration of the movements in themselves and is not a reaction to the music. The movement and the music do not have a subservient relationship with each other, but meet on an equal footing. Sanchis is not looking for movements that ‘tell’ something or which are intended to communicate ideas, but for movements which are. Salva Sanchis: ‘The movement says something about itself and about everything it might be but is not.’ Improvisation plays an important part in his working method and he wishes in addition to explore the relationship between silence and sound. The title, Still Live, can after all be read in several ways. Lachenmann’s composition is both preceded and followed by sequences of movement that take place in silence.

The artist Kristof Van Gestel designed a monolithic wall for the set. In a similar way to Sanchis, Van Gestel does not see his sculptures as isolated islands of meaning, but as related to the space around them, and with the dancers who move in the space. Salva Sanchis himself dances, joined by Manon Santkin and Mioko Yoshihara.