At the Opera Comédie one evening at Montpellier Danse, I overheard during the curtain call one of the festival directors exclaim: ‘C’est radical!’ In some ways perhaps it was radical. The work we’d just seen was Armin Hokmi’s Bazm (repertoire). It’s a choreography of extremely minimalist gestures, which goes against the grain of the massive stage surrounding them. But its music was anything but. It was serviceable, pleasant to listen to, well produced. But radical? Hardly. Nobody seems to expect music to be. Why is that? Could there be an implicit quid pro quo? If you consent to sit through our weird contemporary dance show, we promise to serve you nice music!
Everyone wants to be associated with cool music. Music is the coolest thing known to humankind. Dance is also quite cool too, insofar as a select group of people know about it and even fewer can actually do it professionally. For most of us, the memory of some thrilling performance will have been accompanied by music, and that music will be inextricably woven into the experience. Choreographers know this, which is why they jealously accumulate shiny digital kopeks of music on massive playlists, like the dragon Smaug and his treasure under the mountain, in fear that some day their inspiration might desert them.
A composer friend of mine once declared to me that dance was an inferior artform in that it was subservient to music. He was being deliberately provocative and yet I can’t help but think there is a hidden kernel of truth in what he said. What he meant was that when people go to see a performance of [Insert Famous Dance Company Name Here] set to Mozart’s ‘Elvira Madigan’ Concerto or to a Bach violin partita, and they exclaim how beautiful the dance was, what they were actually talking about was the music. Sure, they might have enjoyed the same dancers doing the same choreography in silence, but it seems doubtful they would have cared half as much.
In truth, where would dance be without music?
In David Stubbs’ book Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen, he examines the reason why music’s 20th-century breakthroughs went largely ignored by the general public, in contrast to modern art, which was not only accepted by mainstream culture but actually became a lucrative business for the artists at its forefront. This is all the more surprising to Stubbs and composers themselves, given the primal, sub-lingual nature of music, or what the painter Kandinsky saw as ‘the only true “abstract” art’.
Dance followed a similar trajectory in that, for all its permutations over the 20th century, none of these were of much interest to the general public. In Britain for instance, the notion of contemporary dance has become a lazy punchline: at best people recognise it as a noble but hermetic venture; at worst it is shorthand for excesses of artistic masturbatory arrogance. Even in other European countries with more open attitudes to contemporary dance, where its weirdness is still (thank god) celebrated by national institutions, its history remains a niche preoccupation. Why, then – given music and dance’s twin ostracisations from mainstream culture and the symbiotic nature of their relationship – do we talk so little about music when we discuss dance? Why, judging from the offerings of a festival like Montpellier, its programme notes, Q&As and interviews, does so much of the music accompanying it seem unworthy of mention?
To use again the example of Hokmi’s Bazm (repertoire), it’s notable that the programme notes talk about creating a new movement language, claim that the dance ‘emerges from a primal impulse, a sort of access mode to our relationship to the world’, with no mention that this brave frontier of movement is drenched from start to finish in electronic music (by Helen Island and CARYO).
The same happens with Jann Gallois’ Imminentes, which relies heavily on its Hans Zimmer-esque sound score, by Patrick De Oliveira, to lend the work a Hollywood-flavoured cinematic quality. Here’s what the blurb has to say about it:
The piece unfolds in continuous sequences, gaining in intensity and speed, carried by the motif of the round: gathering, continuity. If you see Matisse in it, that’s entirely normal. Patrick De Oliveira’s original music establishes a crescendo, carried by six dancers who occupy the space relentlessly.
Note where the blurb isn’t being vague: ‘la ronde’ is a specific reference to Matisse’s La Danse, his 1909 painting of dancers holding hands in a circle. About the music, in contrast, all we get is that it ‘installs a crescendo’ which, translated, means ‘it gets louder, guys’. This is exactly the point Stubbs was making: audiences are supposed to get Rothko and Matisse, but we have this strange reluctance to enlighten them when it comes to the emotional core of the piece. Music remains unremarked upon – unlistened to.
Unexamined by any real critical attention, sound often seems to default to something safe; which brings us to the now ubiquitous ‘rave’ trend of dance scoring. My mind traces this to Sharon Eyal, who had her finger on the pulse (sorry) before everyone else with Killer Pig in 2009, after which everyone seemed to be remaking the Killer Pig score in some form or other. The rave dance score is recognisable by the heavy bass beat, and has also given us the dirty bass line you hear in many new or recent creations, from Leïla Ka’s To cut loose to Marco da Silva Ferreira’s F*cking Future. There’s little evidence that broadsheet critics are remotely interested in this aspect of the dance scene.
At Montpellier the dirty bass line makes an appearance in Zoé Lakhnati’s This is la mort, a fun outdoor/site-specific piece with a sound score by Macarena Bielski López that is integral to the work, chopping in pieces of zeitgeisty sentences and sounds. Here too, some illumination about the nature of this collaboration would have been welcome. Worth noting too is the trend in dancer–sound designer collaborations such as this, which has give rise to a more producer-driven quality of sound (as opposed to them ore traditional composer-driven score).
Voetvolk, the Belgian company behind Tempest, offers the clearest counter-example. The company has two equal co-founders – choreographer Lisbeth Gruwez and her musical other half, Maarten Van Cauwenberghe – and the programme notes let them talk about the score at length: 80 to 90 percent pure percussion –vibraphone, marimba, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Thai drums, almost no melody or harmony, ‘only rhythm and colour’, built deliberately to graze discomfort, inspired by watching Muay Thai fights in Thailand. It’s not tonal, nor is it always pleasant, and someone even bothers to explain why.
Possibly the work at Montpellier Danse that managed to be the coolest without the support of any music was Abby Z’s Radioactive Practice, whose blurb stated flatly: ‘no music, only sneakers and breath’. Here, whatever the merits of the work itself, at least there is some acknowledgment of a musical decision. Here, in the absence of music (save for some short intermission-like soundscapes), the coolness came mo(i)stly from the performers themselves – atypical, fringes, androgynous – and just from the sheer feat of refusing a pre-recorded sound score for the entire show (which in my mind is always fairly gangsta).
Not all of this, I think, is necessarily a failure of taste. For starters, it’s hard to blame anyone for reaching for pretty, pleasing, producer-made music when budgets are shrinking and a thirty-second Insta clip carries so much weight (and who, these days, can afford to commission a composer, let alone credit one properly?) But Voetvolk and Abby Z prove alternatives are possible. Yet dance, specific and idiosyncratic as it likes to think itself, still seems to need to buy its way past its own reputation with nice sounds – and it would be nice, once in a while, if it went the other way, and festival programmes trusted our ears half as much as they already trust our eyes. ●
Dom Czapski’s trip to Montpellier was supported by Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
