Bouge B

The last-minute call of Julie to ask me to come to Bouge B, the contemporary dance festival at deSingel, was one of the highlights of last week. We saw ‘Solos Bach & Gould’, created and adapted by Federica Porello and danced by Albert Quesada and Petra Söör.
The source of inspiration was the performance of Glenn Gould of the Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach, along with extracts of an interview with him.

Just like the sound fragments, the dance performance felt like an intense research process. The artist finds his freedom of interpretation within the clearly indicated borders of the original work. In that aspect the performance succeeded and stimulated my curiosity. The focus of both dancers was admirable too and elevated it all.

On the other hand, and this is partly my own fault, I could not help but to compare this dance piece with the previous choreography I saw on the Goldberg Variations. This was the one of Compagnie Marie Chouinard, titled “bODY_rEMIX / gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS”, which simply took my breath away when I saw it in Aachen. Competing against that is hard, but I guess that’s not really the point since all the other factors were so different.

(photo: ltr Vera Tussing, Albert Quesada and Petra Söör)
A comment that I heard quite some times from the audience after the performance and once on the website of deSingel, was that the piece was a bit too repetitive and too long. My first reaction is to agree, but maybe we all sometimes need to ask ourselves the question if we really need to be in a rush with permanent variation in order to be entertained. Food for thought, I think.

In any case, I am really glad I had the chance to see it and especially that Julie and I had a nice talk with the artists in person afterwards. They were really cool and you could see they are passionate about what they do.
The afterparty with Squadra Bossa feat. Buscemi & Pierre Elitair was the perfect ending of the night, because all the dancers, organizers and spectators just mingled at the bar and on the dancefloor. That’s when Julie went crazy with her camera and made the beautiful snapshots for this article.

You can find all the juicy details of the deSingel projects on TheYoungOnes, for which Julie is a photo reporter: http://theyoungones.desingel.be/tyo/

Julie & Vincent