Text spoken during the lecture/performance
by Emmanuelle Pépin

SOUND – listening – GESTURE
in Improvisation
 
Emmanuelle Pépin, dance and texts, Lionel Garcin, music
 
Cefedem AuRA, Lyon, January 24, 2023
 

Transcription from the video of the lecture/performance:
Jean-Charles François.

Video at 8’59”

Listening
Sound
Gesture
Dance and music are definitely linked.
More precisely, movement and sound, or rather musician and dancer.
Each of them draws its origin from the body, from a conscious body, from a living body.
Sounds and movements spring from an act of presence, from an act of listening.
All is there, down deep in yourself. Within reach.
 
The dance creates some sound, born from the sound itself – a distant sound within you, a breath, a beat, a vital impulse.
Sound originates from an instrument that someone plays, it stems from the body, from a movement, the sound is movement. Movement, visible “reasounding”.
 
In an improvised piece, dance, and music, play together in the same space, the space invites, the space listens.
 
It is obvious that the components such as rhythm, duration, texture, pitch, volume, notes, silence, melodies, points of attack, off-beats, impact, resonance, stop, jerking, pre-movement, energy, pulsation, tempo, sound sources, propagation, direction of offering to the space, scores, inputs-outputs, superimpositions, interweaving, are elements with which the dancer plays. The musician too.
The musician can also accompany the dancer, the dancer can accompany the musician, musicians and dancers can accompany each other, or not.
 
Attention drawn, with the eyes of a child, on the phenomena.
 
Contemplation.
 
What does the sound change?
What does the gesture change?
How does the space change?
 
Inventory
The place. Architecture.
In the place.
 
Imaginary.
The time of movements with which we play…

Video at 15’03”

Dance is the art of movement in silence
Music is the art of silence in audible vibrations
Dance is the art of inaudible sound
Music is the art of sound movement, of visible and audible modulation simultaneously
Dance is the art of the gesture of listening
Music is the art of the writing of listening
Dance is the music of the inner impulse
Music is the voice of the inner impulse
Dance is the calligraphy of space, drawing and sculpting invisible landscapes
Music is this deep breathing calligraphing the air, dancing with it, drawing invisible soundscapes
Music is written in space, sculpting it
 
Dance, in instantaneous composition, is like letting yourself to live in the space of emptiness
 
Dance and music are situated there
           together, or rather at the same time
without necessarily “playing harmoniously together”.
 
Dance and music, sounds and movements, play here with the evidence
non-rational, intuitive, sensitive,
imaginary, poetic,
absurd
 

Video at 19’06”

The sound touches the space
The skin is touched by the space
Double movement
Touching
and simultaneously being touched
 
The vibration of sound travels through the air
The skin, flexible membrane, porous, that separates the inner world, that connects it to the outer world
The skin listens
receives
temperature, light, mood
 
The movement moves the air,
creating frictions, passing through it, leaning on it
 
The gesture transforms the space
The sound transforms the space
The sound touches the space
The skin touches the sound
The sound touches the voice
 
It’s physiological
elasticity, intensity
 
Billions of tiny holes make up of my skin
 
As soon as my body is touched,
Everything else is touched
Listening through the skin is subtle, global, inherent
The dancer knows this
the body of the dancer, the body of the musician too
 

Video at 23’12”

Superimposed layers in terms of space
Listening is changing, ideas are moving
perception of sound moves
 
It’s obvious
we don’t listen the same way
 
 
 
My skin is listening, my ear is listening
Funnel, in a shape of a spiral that allows vibrations to pass through
Tiny containers…
In balance
or out of balance…
 
Breaths, beats, pulsations
The naked body, the body is sound, alive
 
Impact
 
Line of sound
 
 

Video at 26’10”

The silence between sounds
The duration of sounds
The duration of a gesture
 
This temporality
 
To feel, to seize, to construct,
to deconstruct
imagine, re-invent
 
A poetics of the instant
 
To be there
 
Before our eyes
 
Let’s listen to that space, let’s listen to that space without moving
sitting, standing, immobile
Let’s listen to the phenomenon
 
Let’s listen to our breathing
Our pulses
Let’s listen to our rhythms in the midst of the sounds of the space all around
Let’s listen to the space’s listening
Let’s listen to the whole as a large score of sounds that cohabit together
that participate together
Our presence at the core
 
Improvisation is the experience of discovery.
We discover discovery at the same time as we discover ourselves.
Improvisation as the experience of unveiling.
 
An on-board calling
A journey, a writing
 
Migrations of living-memories that become one with us, animate us, bringing back the elsewhere in the fabrics of our bodies, undressing us and re-dressing us.
For isn’t it the most naked act of stripping ourselves of what makes us, who we are, to let ourselves “porosited” by an unspeakable mystery, to let ourselves be To let ourselves become another self, without losing ourselves either.
Without getting lost, but always letting by skimming-frolicking in us this madness, this irrational fantasy, allowed here in the now of wide listening, in this big-child game.
Listening is in the midst
Everything lies in the attention given
 
Listening is an act
 
Listening is in the midst
Everything lies in the attention given
 
The slightest movement
The slightest sound, near or far
Beyond the space itself
 
 

Video at 37’09”

Gravity, skeleton, spongious matters
Work on the state of vibrations
The skeleton resonates
The sound vibrations pass through the skin, go through the epidermis, glides over the fascias, glides on the muscles, follow the striae, ligaments and tendons.
The vibrations go down or rather travel, pass through, crawl into the liquids, the lymph.
 
Sounds go through the layers, collide, are jostled, massaged.
It’s physiological
The joints let the information pass,
Circulation of the sounds, of energy, of movement, in the smallest corners.
 
 

Video at 39’36”

The body is touched by sound
 
Body energy heats up
Temperature rises
The skin transmits to the air the energy of movement, invisible movement beyond the body
 
Particles
Flying matter in the air, it’s physical, physiological
The air is stirred by movement, by sound
Sounds and movements are linked undeniably
 
 

Video at 42’48”

Lines of sounds
Dance as a dynamic manifestation of the void
The essence of sound, the essence of gesture
The immense void, phenomenal chaos giving life
Spine, ear, ramifications, articulations
Freedom
Space is itself listening, a place for listening
The sounds are driven as a flux, playing in joyful expectation of the next movement, playing in the joints just long enough to find a new way to follow
Liquids, an ocean in itself
Incandescent, phosphorescent, luminescent meanderings
Listening through liquids is a shifting listening
 
(…)
 
… in disequilibrium…
              …listening…         …now…
           …beatings…
                   …pulses…
 
The body…
 
(…)
 
The space of nothingness
   The deafening resounding