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A BEGINNING #16161D is what's left of color when you're plunged into darkness, and this is the experience Aurora Bauza and Pere Jou invite us to share at Barcelona's Auditori on March 11 and 12. An original and poetic musical and choreographic creation that pushes back the limits of the senses and offers itself up to fantasy, and with which Hémisphère son is associated. Meet the two protagonists.
Aurora, Pere, where and how did your project come about?
Pere Jou: Eleven years ago, as part of a master's degree in interdisciplinary music at the Higher School of Music of Catalonia and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. We both had the same interest in discovering and perceiving music from different angles. I studied classical music, but when I met Aurora, I was working in the field of pop music.
And I met you, Aurora ?
I was also classically trained, studying piano and then musicology.
And then it all began?
PB : Little by little, we began composing for audiovisual, dance and theater companies, and our work gradually merged with a scenic language, until the interest outstripped the situation. Suddenly, we felt the need to create proposals in which we worked with stage language, but in such a complex way that we didn't know where the body ended and the voice ended.
AB: In fact, we still find it hard to define our proposal, as we are sometimes pigeonholed as theater, dance, music..... And to tell the truth, I don't know myself!
And how do you interpret this difficulty in categorizing and cataloguing your proposal?
AB: It's still difficult for the institution to understand that languages are increasingly hybrid and that they fit less and less into canonical categories; we still categorize our proposals a lot; I suppose it's to make them understandable to the public.
PJ: We work on the musical and the choreographic.
AB: Yes, it's true, we needed to offer something musical but which, at the same time, was linked to the stage, but in a different way.
And from what point of view?
PJ: There's something in our way of thinking about music that goes beyond what is traditionally conceived as musical; something that remains limited to the strictly musical terrain.
Give us an example.
PJ: You're at an early music concert and suddenly the musicians are standing up instead of sitting down. This already strikes us as a powerful scenic choice; and then, we ask ourselves, why not go a step further? Because you perceive sound phenomena not only through your ears, but also through your eyes.
AB: Yes, and aesthetically too. In the beginning, we wanted to try out other formats of musical creation. What's more, Pere and I came from a very codified musical background, where everything is very measured, with dramaturgies without movement. The question is how the music is perceived if the code is different. That's how we approach dance.
PJ: Exactly, because dance involves elements of rhythm, composition and so on. And the voice, a crucial element in our research, is the perfect link, because it is the instrument-body.
AB: In fact, all our research starts from the body.
Indeed, you do research on the body, but from what perspective?
PJ: We tend to arrange bodies in space so that the relationship between them, in a very dilated temporality of events on stage, gives rise to a series of images that refer precisely to these bodies.
AB: Yes, and they refer to the construction of the self, human relationships, the construction of language and of a social group, of the self with the group, etc. In other words, extra-musical material emerges, and thanks to it, new codes are perceived on all these themes.
And how do you work?
AB: We start with an idea, which is generally more formal than conceptual. For example, in the work we did forAuditori, we started with the idea of darkness. Then, with a group of people, we asked ourselves what happened in the auditory field when we provoked this darkness; what could happen if, in this darkness, the sense of the visual was eliminated and other modes of understanding, sensitivity and perception were reinforced.
PJ: In other words, the starting point was how to perceive movement, if not through the visual. It was a question of rethinking things in reverse.
Like synesthesia?
PJ: Yes, and when you put a point of light into this darkness, it's a great discovery, almost an epiphany. The question is how to dissociate the voice from the body that generates it. For example, for me to generate a certain melody or sound with my voice, the body is arranged in a certain way. So I want to hack into that, go against it and see what image it generates.
It must be delicate work.
PJ: We play, we take the time to research and understand what we want to talk about. Once we know what the piece is about, we start to...
AB: ... build it. And we need several weeks of rehearsal to find out: we have to create materials, research and test them in space.
PJ: Of course, as this is a performance, it's necessary for the performers to incorporate and embody the materials of the movement composition in its integrity.
Now tell us how your first piece "I AM (T)HERE" came about?
AB: We had already presented this first piece in a reduced format at a festival created by the Liceo. We then received a commission from this festival and thought it was an opportunity. So we started researching it, presented it in January, realized that we liked it and decided to continue researching and developing it until we presented it at the Greek Festival (in July, editor's note).
PJ: That was the idea before: how to dissociate the body from the voice and propose two parallel lines of language, but embodied in a single organism.
And then came WE ARE (T)HERE.
PJ: Yes, that piece is 25 minutes long. It's the same idea but displaced towards the group, towards the collective.
AB: And, of course, this new approach generated other symbolisms.
PJ: In fact, the piece followed its own path: how does a stage presence maintain itself because the voice and the body are dissociated?
This idea almost goes back to the classic question of whether body and soul can be dissociated.
AB: When we see a body that sings, but whose presence goes in another direction, it generates a body that's alienated from itself, because it's doing two autonomous things. This particular presence allows us to talk about the images that interest us, in the poetic field, by suggesting different interpretations. We place the body in a frame that allows the spectator to project many interpretations onto it.
PJ: Yes, that's true, but framed in a semantic field of human relations.
To conclude, I'd like to talk about A BEGINNING #16161Dthe piece you'll be presenting at the Auditori.
PJ: That number in the name is a color code. In fact, colors have codes.
AB: It's the color we see in the absence of light. In fact, we have the ability to see black: for example, if we see a black object in bright conditions. But in the absence of light, it's not black that we see, but a grayish color, hence the idea behind the title.
The starting point was darkness. It resonates very well.
AB: Yes, we looked for information on this whole world of darkness, on retinal processes, on psychology, cognition, people with vision problems, etc.
PJ: I'd like the audience to receive it from a child's point of view, in the good sense of the word, because by entering the darkness, the spectator will be plunged into vulnerability, and with the idea of voice, body and movement, they will enter fantasy.
AB: This work calls for an interest in other modes of perception, because by extracting the visual, which is the quickest way to analyze reality, the work proposes that we understand what happens when the visual is displaced. Open up and let yourself be carried away by the proposal.
Interview by Txema Seglers
Photos © Anna Fàbrega
