2013, In the beginning, Jalianne Li, The Place, Resolution! 2013
A work for 8 dancers and two audio channels composition, performed at Resolution Festival 2013 at The Place, London, featuring Jalianne Li‘s choreography.
“Resolution always has its mind- blowing moments and this is exactly what choreographer Jalianne Li achieves with In the Beginning for the eight-strong ensemble surFace dance. This mesmerising onslaught on the senses is a wild trip into abstraction. With an elemental and searing score by Tommaso Perego and dancer Bolam Lee’s energy and grace the work has a relentless power, offering a matrix of mutated and primordial body metaphors”
Peter Lindley in Morning Star Online.
For me, this collaboration has been an exciting opportunity to work with a choreographer focussed on developing a completely unusual (at least for me) idea of choreography. Jalianne’s research is about the integration of facial expressions in dance choreography. Her initial examples triggered my imagination straight away, perhaps because performed so well by the talented Panayiotis Tofi and Bolam Lee.
I have worked on this idea of generating a performance from nothing, literally from the movement of a mouth with glowing lips, shown on stage in the dark, at the origin of the world.
Imagining how the world could have been generated, I started fantasising on each sonic element, building the first section of work following Jalianne’s concept of forming islands on stage, giving impressions of waters colliding, and vulcanos collapsing, and matter aggregating.
Then the score progressed conveying the ideas of the birth of primordial creatures, expressed bizarrely in an electronically transformed fuge in the style of J.S. Bach, first in the depth of the seas, then when they landed on the earth.
My ideas, rushed to completion for the tight deadlines of Resolution! format (at least as they were in 2013!), were about capturing the first element and then figuring out how to make it be alive on stage for so long and with enough life to be danced to, creating aggregates of sounds and textures when needed, exploring unexpected melodies or harmonies taken from minimal timbral ideas.
With Jalianne we have then embarked on new collaborative projects, such as Stranded, but we have already been planning new developments for this particular choreography and collaboration which we enjoyed so much producing.