The musicality of the movement

Thématiques de recherche - Musicalité du mouvement

*The notion of musicality of movement covers mainly its organization in time but also the play of energy, tension-relaxation and breathing that takes place in the body.

This metaphor was inspired by Etienne Decroux himself: in a direct and practical way by the fact that he was singing his mime and movement lessons and because one day in 1977, when becoming professionals, we tried to explain to him the work we were doing on Unstable Equilibrium, he told us with his prophetic and grave voice: Yes! I see, you’re playing musical mime!”
We gradually understood his thinking and the relationship was easily formed with the notion of dynamorythmas or dynamovitesses which he evoked in these courses.

The corps musical become théâtral. Slow, accelerating, decelerating, silence, immobility, pinched, vibrato, forcefully, percussion, choc appuyé, choc suspendu, ma non tropo, deviennent états d’âme, émotions, pensées, etc…

Metaphors stimulate the imagination: movement in snail antennas, consequence of string stick, sail boat, spider spit are all musical finesse that speak of the relation of our movement actor to the world.

It plays the game of consequences and just necessity: a slowness will echo a sudden shock, a held immobility will call a softly imperceptible decryption, a tension will subside brutally, a held breath will ask sigh…
The play of breathing (on the edge of vocalization), determines tensions and releases. The breathing becomes dramatic and rhythms the small inner music.

Musical body play, a portrait of the arcanes of thought (revealing its hesitations, its certainties, its renunciations, its decisions, its doubts, etc.) distils at will the pathetic, lightness, humor.
The body of the actor is thus musical theatre, modulating the speeds, preparing the flashes (of theatre), clouding the colors to infinity (by retention, restriction, calculated relaxation, excessive expenses, maintained restraint, compression, expansion, invasion), varying the tonus qualities at different levels of the body or generalizing them.

This musicality will also be for «the author-composer-director» a point of fundamental sensitivity organizing choirs, canons, fugues and solist moments. He will have the responsibility through this musicality to organize the set of tensions held with the public in an empathic relationship… and musical.

In the continuity of this notion of the musicality of the movement, Claire Heggen and Yves Marc have very early explored among others with the Roy Hart Theatre (Vicente Fuentes, Enrique Pardo, Liza Meyer) then with classical singing (with Louis Jacques Rondeleu and Françoise Barto) the relationship of voice and movement in a theatrical approach resulting from their juxtaposition.

This research leads to the question of redundancies, contradictions, causalities, consequences, impossibilities and constraints. The musicality of the movement dialogued by a reciprocal listening game with the vocal musicality written or improvised.
The work with the musical texts (scores by Georges Aperghis) said on stage in the show Encore une heure si courte was one of the most beautiful implementations of this research.

Le corps à l’ouvrage, de l’art gestuel, de l’art théâtral