After a show called Bach in 2004, followed by On Goldberg Variations/Variations, the last part of your tetralogy is this Inventions. Is that the end of this journey alongside Johann Sebastian Bach? Eighteen years is a long time, but it’s also a short time to work on this great composer. What do you keep discovering in his music after all this time?
María Muñoz: We wanted to reach for the essence of music and dance, and since Johann Sebastian Bach is a composer who’s been present in our research since the very beginning of Mal Pelo, over thirty years ago, we keep coming back to him.
Pep Ramis: María created a first solo in 2004. We wanted to create a pure dance performance accompanied by music: we chose Johann Sebastian Bach. Then came On Goldberg Variations/Variations, in which we shared this original solo with the Mal Pelo collective. Bach has always allowed us to create conversations. His music is alive, and he remains a great source of inspiration. If you don’t tell yourself “I’m making contemporary art,” the timeline opens up, and you find you belong to a longer period in the history of mankind. You’re freer when it comes to the references you can use, you can draw from the literature, music, and art of other centuries, and adapt them for the present. It’s a beautiful sensation to create a connection with Johann Sebastian Bach’s incredible compositions. We’ve played a lot with the musicians, studied his music, reinterpreted it; we’ve worked against and with him, with our backs to him, or facing him.
M. M.: Johann Sebastian Bach’s music has always been for us an amazing tool for learning. In it, we’ve found methods to move from a simple structure to a complex one, to work on the essence with very few gestures, just like he does with very few notes. To understand how he creates a dynamic and nuances in the way he uses counterpoint in his writing, how harmonies arise in his composition, how some moments lead you to listen to different voices.
Inventions is a show created to be adapted to each performance venue. There is therefore always a new work to do based on the space, on architecture. What are the specificities of this work of adaptation?
P.R.: First, we work on sound and its texture. Fanny Thollot, our sound designer, can make sound move in a very natural way. Then we work on the space. Every venue has different tensions and dimensions, a different luminosity. We play with the depth of those spaces and work layer by layer. For the Festival d’Avignon, for instance, we have to take the wind into account. Performers can enter the stage in a different way, the order of the solos can change. The show’s substance remains the same, but there are changes. It also has an effect on the length of the different segments. And all of that impacts the composition of the show. Some of the scenes are fixed, while others are more improvised, more modular.
M.M.: It’s the group dynamic that reveals the soul of the show. We’re always thinking about movement as we work on the atmosphere, in terms of sound and lighting. We’re trying to figure out how those atmospheres we create move through space, how they spread in a fluid way. The body is generally at the centre of our creation, and the work on the scenic space, the lighting, the videos we project, the texts all intertwine in successive layers.
The narrative aspect of Inventions seems very abstract, with no linear story…
P.R.: We like to work on the tension between opposing elements, it opens up many perspectives. We like contrasts, thanks to them a show can be at once fragile and powerful, realistic and spiritual, black and white, light and dark, with a fluctuating relationship between those extremes. One cannot exist without the other. What’s interesting is the tension opposites create. It’s the same idea when it comes to the creation of elements of narration, you have to ask yourself how final you want the show to be, whether you want to have a resolution or to leave it open to questions. Which can be even more interesting, because it arouses the spectators’ interest and stimulates their imagination.
M. M.: Our writing—the way we use the various scenic languages—is not unlike that of a poet. We invent landscapes we don’t necessarily recognise, but which we accept as a premise. Then, little by little, we enter that landscape, without explaining why. Words cannot quite describe those images, but we find ourselves caught in the journey.
P. R.: Our narrative style can sometimes seem chaotic and very strange, but it makes sense for us, there’s a logic to it, and we hope the spectators will be able to join us.
In the show, words follow movement. The words of the late John Berger and of Erri de Luca often accompany your creations. How do they find their place in the scenic composition? What is your relationship to those texts?
P.R.: Our relationship is physical. Our first artistic relationship with a writer, and probably the deepest, was with John Berger. It lasted twelve years. Upon reading his books, we felt the very physical way he has of describing details, bodies, sensations, the social aspect of art, the real depth and simplicity of his writing. When we met him, he was exactly like that, very generous. Right away he turned to our interests, our poetry, our world. We became fast friends. He allowed us to use his texts, to modify them as we saw fit. With John Berger, we used to talk a lot, and it’s the same with Erri de Luca. He once told us that as soon as he was done writing a book, it wasn’t his anymore, it belonged to others…
M. M.: We got close to those writers in different ways. We’re very much alike, the four of us. They liked to come to Animal a l’esquena, our space of training and exchange between artists in Celrà, near Girona, which is also where we live. What we share isn’t just our artistic life, but also our everyday life, those shared moments. It’s not easy to include texts in a dance performance, because words hit in a very unique way, our mind tries to understand them right away, they lead you to other worlds. But John’s and Erri’s words meshed with our work very well.
How do you work with this large team made up onstage of two quartets of musicians and singers and eight dancers, including you two, in addition to the technicians working backstage?
M.M.: Our way of composing comes in part from a group practice we’ve developed together over many years. We mix our languages. We come from very different backgrounds, we each bring specific tools with which we work collectively. Inventions was created in the middle of the pandemic. We had to adapt to the situation, draw up new plans every day. With musical director Joel Bardolet, vocal director Quiteria Muñoz, the dancers, and Fanny Thollot, we decided to begin by working on the music at home, on our own.
P.R.: It took us a while to choose all the pieces we use. We first had to structure the score, then create the show around it. We had to feel the music, balance out the tonality, cut the passages that were too long, invite our own narration among the infinite possibilities Bach’s music offers. We’re very happy with the result, Inventions is pure Johann Sebastian Bach.
M.M.: The first thing we had to develop was this shared language. It has something to do with the way we use the body and its different qualities. We really worked a lot on what we called “tuning,” as for musical instruments. We’re all part of this complex score in which our bodies must be in a state of listening, sensitive, in line with what we generate. Slowly, musicians joined in on the tuning. They taught us a lot about the music, in a very simple way. We started sharing those important ideas about movement, the space, the tone of the music. Each performer has their own qualities, some have a great choreographic vision, others a deep sense of the theatrical, they have a very powerful presence on stage. They can convey ideas, possibilities about the dramaturgy. That’s what I really like about working with other people.
Interview conducted by Malika Baaziz and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach