now h e r e

sit down, sit back. lean forward, lean back. open, close your eyes. repeat. relax. 4 dancers, 4 speakers, now on, now off stage, hidden but not hiding. an absent element driving the here and now continuously forward in an ever modulating present. what you don't see is active and concrete. what you see is resonance and reflection, copies without originals. now h e r e is n o w here.

...il serait impossible, par exemple, de définir l'être comme une présence - puisque l'absence dévoile aussi l'être, puisque ne pas être la, c'est encore être.
(...it would be impossible, for instance, to define being as a presence, since absence also reveals the act of being: to not be there is still to be.)
J.-P. Sartre, L'Être et le Néant

I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Two years after the premiere of “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”, Salva Sanchis brings back together the same creative team for his new performance, titled “now h e r e”.

Cognitive neurology and associated fields of study are constantly redefining the role of perception in our understanding of reality. At the same time, modern theoretical physics tells us that not only do we get diverging results from looking at the universe in different ways, but that we might also be actually transforming physical reality just by looking at it. This constant re-shaping of our understanding of the universe and ourselves in it was a source of inspiration and a point of departure for this project. The end point is a dance piece. And that in itself is a new starting point.

Featuring an original music score by Peter Lenaerts, “now h e r e” is a dance quartet that puts forward the idea of absence as its main generator. Every movement in the dance responds to and interacts with another movement that is not actually shown. Framed by the tension of the hidden vs. the apparent, the resulting dance is made of reactions rather than actions. But far from being just imperfect copies, all the movements that we do see become concrete in their own right, because they are motivated by something else that is real, if not present. Finally, the movement is because of what it refers to. As in Plato’s myth of the cave, all we see may be shadows, but those shadows do become our reality.

The music was created by following a similar process. Peter Lenaerts asked 4 musicians to respond separately to a number of original compositions. These recordings were then synced up with each other and the original composition was removed. Out of the resulting material Peter created a new score. Just as in the dance, the absent common generator binds the music together to create an independent object. Absence provokes presence.

The dialog between the music and the dance results in an abstract composition of a wide range of dynamics and limitless vocabulary. A piece that purposefully lives within the realm of pure dance, with a meticulous attention to language, and that offers multiple readings. Using a strict compositional approach to organize real-time generated movement, Sanchis presents what is probably his most radical and yet most nuanced work to date.

• Salva Sanchis has been choreographing his own work since 1998. He has collaborated both as dancer and choreographer with Marc Vanrunxt and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker on different occasions. Next to his new creation “now h e r e”, he also currently tours a solo piece in collaboration with pianist/composer Kris Defoort and a group piece in collaboration with organist Bernard Foccroulle. Salva is also a research guide and member of the faculty of PARTS, the contemporary dance school directed by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.
Salva Sanchis is a member and artistic co-director of Kust/Werk vzw, a dance company based in Antwerp.