Emmanuel Gat explains why it’s easier to choreograph to Pierre Boulez than pop music and how his dancers perform ‘with a question mark not an exclamation mark’

Tue 14 Nov 2023 07.00 CET

‘All around me are familiar faces / worn-out places, worn-out faces” goes the song, and a man on stage in a voluminous skirt jerks his body with the beat as Mad World fills the auditorium. LoveTrain2020 is the new show from Marseille-based Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat, set entirely to the music of Tears for Fears. Not the usual soundtrack for contemporary dance, but if Birmingham Royal Ballet can dance to Black Sabbath (not to mention Arthur Pita’s Björk Ballet, or Marco Goecke’s Tori Amos dance piece) then why not?

Gat, 54, never owned a Tears for Fears album when he was growing up near Tel Aviv in the 1980s as a shaggy-haired surf-mad teen. “I was listening to a lot of progressive rock, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Jethro Tull,” he tells me in the green room after a show in Bruges. “But everybody knows this music, everywhere we go.”