Published on 19 March 2025 at 3.31pm
CRITIQUE - Can dance celebrate the freedom of performer and give birth to a masterpiece? The choreographer gives a splendid demonstration of this at the Théâtre de la Ville.
So what is this new play by Emanuel Gat that has the demanding audience at the Théâtre de la Ville on their feet like one man? It's called Freedom Sonata. It is a splendid demonstration of freedom, an exercise rarely presented in dance, a discipline more often than an art form, according to Gat, who denounces learning and practising it as a form of copying and training. The question is how to choreograph differently. Gat, playing with paradoxes, demonstrates that it is possible. In his view, the choreographer's role is to observe and discover what the dancers propose to him, in order to bring out material that is not manufactured but already there. All you have to do, he says, is listen and listen carefully.
at the height of his freedom. Yet the piece is by no means a vast bazaar. Exposition, development, re-exposition: such is thread of sonata form and such are three beats of this Freedom Sonata, a reflection on elevation and gravity, which begins with white costumes on a black background ends on a white stage with black costumes. The same smoke, calculated lighting and refined backdrops. It's natural that freedom, well exercised and excellently served, should induce transformations.
Its material? A troupe of eleven personalities, honed by the game of research. Nothing stands in their way: they are intelligent in their movements and in the full exercise of themselves. Their dance fizzes out: it's the language with which they exchange. It is ephemeral and speaks of themselves. About their everyday lives, without ever being constrained by the ambition to be "artistic" or "sublime". We're on a dance floor, walking, running, challenged, in a group, alone, tender, in search of elevation. There's nothing conventional about the vocabulary. Pirouettes and grand jetés remain in the wardrobe. The movements are all wood, as if in uninhibited conversation. Certain combinations recreate, without any props, the way you make yourself a cup of coffee, or the way you beg, only to throw it at others and go elsewhere.
The others respond to these suggestions, in unison or in dialogue. The tableaux take shape, a succession of unstable figures like the materials of our very lives, so much so that this troupe of eleven, given over to these free exchanges, has energy to spare. Obviously, beauty emerges, bewitching and magnificent, as does speed, abandonment, absencepresence, elegance, challenge, caress, a lift or a genuflection.
The play that preceded the creation leaves the dance in a state of splendid vivacity. It seems to be inventing itself. The choreographer signs the distribution of the groups in the space, which suddenly reveals itself to be different: the tracks of music may flow, but they in no way shape this stage where Gat liberates the dance in its pure emergence. For the music is at the origin of the piece, even if the dancers do not usually write about it. They are big enough to follow his musicality or not, here rather than there, at the moment of taking to the stage. Gat chose to mix Kanye West's Life of Pablo with Beethoven's Sonata Op 111 in C minor. Once again, he didn't expect anything of it, fearing that his visions of the future would be too far-fetched.
the freedom of the dancers. He expected nothing, so anything was possible. At the risk of a masterpiece.
"Freedom Sonata, at the Théâtre de la Ville until 21 March, then on tour.