No Title / Movement on Movement

In a thousand ways

To be or not to be, that is the question. Good old Shakespeare soon spotted that. You can approach this ‘primal theme’ in a thousand ways, even with a light touch. And even in a dance performance. Which is what Mette Edvardsen and Noé Soulier are doing. We present a unique double programme by them. To watch or not to watch. We recommend the former. Heartily.

Mette Edvardsen - No Title

Mette Edvardsen’s work is both profound and humorous, and simple and rich in detail. Over the past ten years she has created a coherent series of performances in which she occasionally also explores media such as video films and books. It started with Private collection (2002). About how we organise things by collecting and ordering them. In Black (2011) she made invisible objects appear on the empty stage by ‘naming’ them. The new No Title starts where Black ended. She looks at what is not, as a way of activating and producing thoughts and imagination. She addresses what is by negating it. Once you leave behind what is not, you get a view of all there is. And once again Edvardsen plays with the possibilities and limitations of language, time and space.  

• The Norwegian-Brussels choreographer and performer Mette Edvardsen has staged all of her performances in the Kaaistudio’s. Together with Heine Avdal, Liv Hanne Haugen and Lawrence Malstaf she presented the wonderful Sauna in Exile which we staged in an empty swimming pool in Vorst in 2002. 

Noé Soulier - Movement on Movement

In his new lecture performance Noé Soulier investigates the transition from referential gestures to autonomous movement. Soulier physically reproduces sequences from the Improvisation Technologies by William Forsythe in which Forsythe demonstrates his method of generating movements; he makes movements that comment on other movements by underlining specific elements. These movements are not Forsythe’s choreography, they are what happens when he explains his approach to movement. By using them as dance material, Soulier gives them another status: what happens when an explanation of the material becomes the material itself? The movements in combination with Soulier's reflexive discourse create a counterpoint, sometimes almost in unison, sometimes more dissonant, on the relationships between intention, action and meaning.

• Noé Soulier studied dance (PARTS, Brussels) and philosophy (Sorbonne, Paris). In 2011 we presented his Ideography. Movement on movement will premiere at the Festival d'Automne 2013 in Paris.

'If you have seen the delightful Mouvement sur Mouvement, you will never view dance in the same way again.' – dance magazine Mouvement