Thierry De Mey: composer as choreographer

Over the years, the composer and director Thierry De Mey has worked with a number of famous choreographers. Now, after the premiere of his first dance work, Simplexity, at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, De Mey will be able to call himself a choreographer too.

For a long time, I resisted the idea of doing a choreography myself," says Thierry De Mey, "among other reasons, because composing and directing is already more than enough for one human life. But my films and music have been dance-related ever since the 1980s. If you look at my scores, they look very like the notes you might give a dancer. The idea behind Simplexity is to create a transdisciplinary work. Not by adding one layer on top of another, but by composing the music and dance at the same time. Music and movement are, in any case, closely related. When you listen to a track by Prince or a Mahler symphony, it is the kinetic part of your brain that is active all the time, even if you stay sitting in your seat."

For the music in Simplexity, De Mey has been able to call on the services of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the legendary Paris-based contemporary-music ensemble founded in 1976 by the composer Pierre Boulez, who died early this year. The ensemble is also closely linked with the IRCAM (the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), an institute devoted to new music and scientific research that was also set up by Boulez.

De Mey: "The whole project began three years ago when, in Paris, I had an opportunity to stage Light Music, a solo for conductor, in which the arm movements are projected and picked up to produce an electronic sound. Pierre Boulez, who was due to appear that same evening at the same venue, spent a whole day watching our rehearsal. All that time, he said nothing, so I feared the worst. But in the evening, after his concert, he called me up onstage and told me, in front of the whole audience, that we had shown him something new. And afterwards, he asked me if I would take on a project with the ensemble. To me, that seemed to be an opportunity to create a work in which the musicians move into the dancers' territory and vice versa."

PARTICLE ACCELERATOR
The collaboration with the IRCAM has made possible a technological input thanks to which dance and both acoustic and electronic music are fed into a sort of particle accelerator. "But you have to be careful with technology too," says De Mey. "You need a lot of time to use it properly and on a full stage you can't do anything like the same things with motion capture as in a Hollywood studio."

The dancers who will share the stage with the musicians are Ildikó Tóth, Louise Tanoto, Peter Juhász, Sara Tan Siyin, and Víctor Pérez Armero – a very diverse and international cast. "When we sent out the invitations for the auditions, I expected about a hundred candidates, but in the end five hundred came along. That gave me the opportunity to choose from a huge number of fantastic dancers with very varied vocabularies, all of which we will use. But it also points to a major problem in the world of dance, which has been the first victim of cutbacks in the theatres and festivals."

SIMPLEXITY. LA BEAUTÉ DU GESTE
20 > 22/5, Kaaitheater, www.kaaitheater.be, www.kunstenfestivaldesarts.be