Rachid Ouramdane - Variation(s)

The alchemy of dance and music, physiologically connected. The sound of movement, an organic score that arises from the simple pulsation of the dancing body, in the empirical relationship with music. And music as a dramaturgical element, recognizable as a gesture, in its direct contact with the different artistic expression of dance.

With Variation(s) the French-Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, one of the leading figures on the French and international scene, returns to the fundamental relationship between dance and music, to the resonance between gesture and sound, to that “power of gesture that makes us feel the music in a different way”. To do so, Ouramdane refers to the teachings of Fernand Schirren – the composer, musician and artisan of rhythm who has trained so many young artists at Béjart’s Mudra/Rudra, at Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Parts and the Cndc in Angers, where Ouramdane met him, and his invitation to seek what is different in what is identical. “To make difference within identicalness visible and tangible, it is important to actively look and listen, only thus will it be possible to see what the variation, the difference, consists in. Hence the idea of calling this work Variation(s), meaning a variation of the same thing: a musical theme, and to make it a different experience each time. Rather quickly, the work was built in collaboration with the composer Jean-Baptiste Julien, who has been with me for a long time. The idea is to show the musical structure in a different way through gesture, dance”.

Ruben Sanchez and Annie Hanauer, who have long worked closely with Ouramdane, are the two masterful dancers who share the same stage in succession but without interruption, executing their steps and their personal choreography to the same music, yet offering the public a completely different experience, each of them highlighting one aspect of Julien’s music, like “the two opposite sides of a Möbius strip”, the symbol of infinity.