Interview
Né Barros
September
2021
Fri
24
Artistic director and choreographer of A História do Soldado by Stravinsky/Ramuz, of Ensemble - Sociedade de Actores with Né Barros, to be presented between October 6 and 9 at Teatro Campo Alegre, and on October 10 under TMP Online.
What can we expect from this encounter between Stravinsky and Ramuz’s classical narrative and your contemporary language? How do past and present, classical and contemporary communicate?
There is, in fact, an interesting issue concerning the relation between times and histories, and the way dance handled narrative throughout its own evolution. I wanted to question that. My personal poetics hasn’t really been that much grounded in the narrative, although I’ve often resorted to text and even created a piece on Lady Macbeth in which the word was present from one end to the other, but always with the dramaturgy looking at the choreographic side. My approach tends to refer to a more abstract universe. Our starting point is a text and I didn’t want the word to be a mere pretext. The idea is to have the issue of movement and gesture (which open themselves to a wider reading) engage in a stimulating way with a history that leads us toward a very well defined and structured message. We’re still in the process of creation, but I believe that, on the one hand, we’ll have a deconstruction component, and on the other hand, we’ll integrate all elements—music, movement, text—so as not to detract from the meaning of The Soldier’s Tale. There is, in fact, a moral to this, a message, and it cannot be ignored either. At the same time, we’re living at a time when dance has had such a long journey that there’s probably an element of deconstruction and of creation of meta-narratives that I may find interesting to develop throughout the process.
Which concepts defined the artistic direction of this presentation? What is new in your approach?
When I was asked to work on The Soldier’s Tale, I very gladly accepted. First and foremost, because I’m very fond of Stravinsky. Then, I researched other versions, trying to figure out how some matters were solved, namely that relation between movement, action, word and music, even if those elements are no strangers to dance itself. Dance has always very much engaged with music from an historical point of view. It is a strong alliance, a marriage that also changed over time with some creators at a certain point favouring the absence of music. I’m thinking of Trisha Brown, for instance, who started by doing a very interesting work, often without music, but as she used to say herself, at some point the silence started to become distressing and she ended up resorting to great musical classics.
I mean to say that even when there’s no music it seems there’s always this dialogue, no matter how deaf and mute, between body and sound. In spite of the fact that this relation between music and dance—and especially between Stravinsky and the choreographers—is not unheard of. There were several possible approaches and I had to understand how to solve some matters, mostly in terms of plot and narrative, concerning the construction of these characters that emerge throughout the piece. It was interesting to realise that there’s already a territory—we’ll try to approach it in our own way and keep on finding more things in it.
In your work on The Soldier’s Tale, what weighed more: the musical score by Stravinsky or the writing by Ramuz? And in what way did they complement one another in the staging?
The music is incredibly strong. When I took up The Soldier’s Tale, the music was the element with the most impact. But the word was also there, and as I said before I didn’t want it to be a mere pretext. So, when I started working more profoundly on the dramaturgy, text and music weighed the same. They had to, not least because the structure is made in a way that includes text, music and action. They’ve been naturally built with this crossing and these layers in mind, some times coexisting and some others in a sequential manner. I felt I had to honour the piece as it was meant.
The idea is for the dance not to be an appendix, coming as an illustration or having a more figurative role. I try to counter that. The issue is that we have not only the characters, but also the narrator, who, at the end, can be anything: the Devil, the soldier, the princess, the king… It’s a ‘polyform’ embodied in a person (the narrator), which is interesting, because we were able to think the characters without closing them. It opened the possibility of multiplying characters, changing them, providing them with a number of imageries. The text in fact has that fluidity. It doesn’t need to be anchored in a character: the text can move around all those bodies on stage.
Despite the will to honour the original work, was there room for improvisation?
As a choreographer, I’m very interested in the writing in the broader sense of the word and in the composition, but improvisation is key to enrich movement and open new possibilities.
There’s improvisation during the process. The structure starts to become stable, we progress as far as the story and the performance are concerned, and I sometimes feel the need to destabilise what we’ve built to test new approaches. The final product is the result of several improvisations, but it is not presented to the audience as a real-time improvisation.
My kind of approach to movement, and the way I work with the performers, is always open to variation, so that the gesture won’t require an exact geometry. It has directions, a layout, a path, but within it there’s room to breathe—and it is never the same.
What other aesthetic elements did you want to explore in this performance?
There’s something interesting that lied underneath the development of the piece: the story of the soldier in a post-War context of impoverishment—that was something I wanted to rethink.
The performance is somewhat bare, with few resources as far as construction is concerned, especially when it comes to the scenery. We present the text, the narration, the body in a less sophisticated way. I was also interested in that as we put together this work.
What can we expect from this encounter between Stravinsky and Ramuz’s classical narrative and your contemporary language? How do past and present, classical and contemporary communicate?
There is, in fact, an interesting issue concerning the relation between times and histories, and the way dance handled narrative throughout its own evolution. I wanted to question that. My personal poetics hasn’t really been that much grounded in the narrative, although I’ve often resorted to text and even created a piece on Lady Macbeth in which the word was present from one end to the other, but always with the dramaturgy looking at the choreographic side. My approach tends to refer to a more abstract universe. Our starting point is a text and I didn’t want the word to be a mere pretext. The idea is to have the issue of movement and gesture (which open themselves to a wider reading) engage in a stimulating way with a history that leads us toward a very well defined and structured message. We’re still in the process of creation, but I believe that, on the one hand, we’ll have a deconstruction component, and on the other hand, we’ll integrate all elements—music, movement, text—so as not to detract from the meaning of The Soldier’s Tale. There is, in fact, a moral to this, a message, and it cannot be ignored either. At the same time, we’re living at a time when dance has had such a long journey that there’s probably an element of deconstruction and of creation of meta-narratives that I may find interesting to develop throughout the process.
Which concepts defined the artistic direction of this presentation? What is new in your approach?
When I was asked to work on The Soldier’s Tale, I very gladly accepted. First and foremost, because I’m very fond of Stravinsky. Then, I researched other versions, trying to figure out how some matters were solved, namely that relation between movement, action, word and music, even if those elements are no strangers to dance itself. Dance has always very much engaged with music from an historical point of view. It is a strong alliance, a marriage that also changed over time with some creators at a certain point favouring the absence of music. I’m thinking of Trisha Brown, for instance, who started by doing a very interesting work, often without music, but as she used to say herself, at some point the silence started to become distressing and she ended up resorting to great musical classics.
I mean to say that even when there’s no music it seems there’s always this dialogue, no matter how deaf and mute, between body and sound. In spite of the fact that this relation between music and dance—and especially between Stravinsky and the choreographers—is not unheard of. There were several possible approaches and I had to understand how to solve some matters, mostly in terms of plot and narrative, concerning the construction of these characters that emerge throughout the piece. It was interesting to realise that there’s already a territory—we’ll try to approach it in our own way and keep on finding more things in it.
In your work on The Soldier’s Tale, what weighed more: the musical score by Stravinsky or the writing by Ramuz? And in what way did they complement one another in the staging?
The music is incredibly strong. When I took up The Soldier’s Tale, the music was the element with the most impact. But the word was also there, and as I said before I didn’t want it to be a mere pretext. So, when I started working more profoundly on the dramaturgy, text and music weighed the same. They had to, not least because the structure is made in a way that includes text, music and action. They’ve been naturally built with this crossing and these layers in mind, some times coexisting and some others in a sequential manner. I felt I had to honour the piece as it was meant.
The idea is for the dance not to be an appendix, coming as an illustration or having a more figurative role. I try to counter that. The issue is that we have not only the characters, but also the narrator, who, at the end, can be anything: the Devil, the soldier, the princess, the king… It’s a ‘polyform’ embodied in a person (the narrator), which is interesting, because we were able to think the characters without closing them. It opened the possibility of multiplying characters, changing them, providing them with a number of imageries. The text in fact has that fluidity. It doesn’t need to be anchored in a character: the text can move around all those bodies on stage.
Despite the will to honour the original work, was there room for improvisation?
As a choreographer, I’m very interested in the writing in the broader sense of the word and in the composition, but improvisation is key to enrich movement and open new possibilities.
There’s improvisation during the process. The structure starts to become stable, we progress as far as the story and the performance are concerned, and I sometimes feel the need to destabilise what we’ve built to test new approaches. The final product is the result of several improvisations, but it is not presented to the audience as a real-time improvisation.
My kind of approach to movement, and the way I work with the performers, is always open to variation, so that the gesture won’t require an exact geometry. It has directions, a layout, a path, but within it there’s room to breathe—and it is never the same.
What other aesthetic elements did you want to explore in this performance?
There’s something interesting that lied underneath the development of the piece: the story of the soldier in a post-War context of impoverishment—that was something I wanted to rethink.
The performance is somewhat bare, with few resources as far as construction is concerned, especially when it comes to the scenery. We present the text, the narration, the body in a less sophisticated way. I was also interested in that as we put together this work.
