"Inventions" by Mal Pelo, extracts

“It's such a beautiful place. It could be here.” Sad and soft strings fill the space of the stage as it slowly lights up. One by one, musicians, classical singers, and dancers enter the light. As in a fugue, they sketch possible trajectories between silence and music. For this next-to-last opus in their tetralogy about the immense work of Johann Sebastian Bach, María Muñoz and Pep Ramis, founders and choreographers of the Spanish collective Mal Pelo, take us on a celestial journey. A crossing where contemporary steps and baroque music create harmonies and counterpoints. The sixteen performers that make up this emotional choir imagine, in the courtyard of the lycée Saint-Joseph, a poetry of movements, voices, notes, and words. Vanishing lines, embraces, conflagrations: bodies brush against each other and draw, through light and sound, moving images of pure beauty. Fragments of Cantatas, Partita No. 2 and of The Art of Fugue break down the space into melodic stratas, a fertile polyphonic sediment, a temporary refuge over the course of a fugue, an infinite shelter for the duration of a movement. Between dance and song, a work that reveals the spaces between heaven and earth, between what’s right next to us and what sits in the distance.