Noé Soulier, Close Up, Linbury Theatre

Noé Soulier, Close Up, Linbury Theatre, March 20, 2025

The single page information sheet for Noé Soulier’s Close Up, issued at the Linbury Theatre as part of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Dance Reflections Festival, states that ‘this creation continues [Soulier’s] exploration of the relationship between dance and live music, already present in Faits et gestes (2016), The Waves (2018) and First Memory (2022). This work also extends his research with live video and the relationship between the camera and the dancers explored in his movie Fragments (2022).’ This might inspire you to search for these works on YouTube but it’s already too late if you are someone seeing Close Up for the first time without knowing about Soulier’s related explorations. As historical information it naturally looks back, while a live performance is very much in the present; Close Up says what it says without any explanation or historical preamble. 

You would think that exploring the relationship between dance and live music is what any choreographer with access to live music would want to explore, but it is not always the case, even in the main Opera House next door, where live music can sometimes exist in a parallel universe to the choreography. But Soulier is both musical and choreographically adept, and he is aided in Close Up by the Ensemble Il Convito directed from the harpsichord by Maude Gratton, playing extracts from JS Bach’s Art of Fugue (Contrapunctus 1, 2, 3, 9, 11 and 14) and the Andante from his Sonata for solo violin no. 2 on period instruments.  

You don’t choose this level of musical invention played by a top class ensemble unless you are ready to bring to it a corresponding level of choreographic integrity. Soulier treats the Art of Fugue with a sense of playful invention of his own in which he brings his choreography to meet the music. They play sometimes together and sometimes alone; Soulier pays his respects to the music and the musicians by having them play two of the fugues without the dancers on stage, and to the dance and the dancers by having them perform without the music. In the former, we hear the music in its natural state, and in the latter we see the music in its transposed state, as if Soulier had choreographed the movements to the score but for these passages simply withheld the music. When they are all together, the music is embodied equally in the dancers and the musicians. 

His six dancers — Julie Charbonnier, Nangaline Gomis, Yumiko Funaya, Samuel Planas, Mélisande Tonolo and Gal Zusmanovich — are all inspired in this joyous exploration of the music which they allow to flow through their youth and enthusiasm in a rhythmic gestural vocabulary that has a decidedly contemporary feel. They also contributed their own improvisational ideas to the choreography. Dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts, the dancers enter and leave the stage like fugal themes, building the complexity of patterns and steps in a constantly morphing series of accumulations and subtractions. The assured smoothness of their gestures, as in the use of the out-breath to emphasise a throwing movement of the arms or the action of kicking a ball into the auditorium, are fused into Bach’s musical invention with delightful freshness.

‘Close up’ refers to the photographic term for a shortening of perspective to bring a subject closer to the lens, and while serving as a metaphor for the exploratory path between live music and choreography, it also manifests in the ongoing scenography (by Soulier, Kelig Le Bars and Pierre Martin Oriol, with additional assistance from Nicolas Bazoge on lighting). At one point the dancers leave the stage as the musicians continue playing. The back curtain draws aside to open up the depth of the stage and reveals a giant screen hovering above a black rectangular structure that resembles the outlines of a camera; in the centre is a frame that suggests a viewfinder with a video camera (the eye) placed in the centre of the frame facing upstage. The choreographic exploration continues but even though we can see the dancers entering and exiting as before, the screen shows only what appears within the frame, in close-up. We see the dancers’ bodies from the thigh to the chest, like Greek statues that have lost their limbs. The video and lighting are beautifully achieved; at times I feel I’m watching a stylish ad for jeans. 

For the final section of Close Up, the dancers fold up the white backdrop, slide the frame off and leave the stage while the musicians continue to play. Is Soulier giving the music the final word? No. The dancers return for an exuberant recapitulation of the choreographic score that, in giving equal value to music and dance, is simply joyous.