Idea and concept: Zoe Balasch
Music: Xavi Lloses
Choreography and performance: Zoe Balasch in collaboration with the group of performers of the Research and Creation LaboratoryCorpografies Inclassificables
Certain mental states have been catalogued by the western medical establishment as altered. The world of dreams, transit, evanescent states of consciousness and everything that happens, become material for an action of resistance where a musician and a group of performers experience an ecstatic immersion for seven hours. A challenging experience where the bodies of the performers become channels of a dance to choreograph the invisible and embark on a journey to mutate towards the unexplored and all that transpires in the plans of the intangible.
1518: This is the year in which in the city of Strasbourg there was the longest and most well-documented rave in history, causing the death of hundreds of people due to the irrepressible impulse to dance. This incident, known as the Strasbourg Dance Plague, had a great impact on society at the time and remains a mystery to this day.
840: At the beginning of composer Erik Satie’s score of Vexations, he wrote: “To play this motif 840 times in succession, it will be good to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the greatest silence, by serious immobilities”. Satie proposes an immersive experience with the music he composed with the intention of provoking alterations in those who play or listen to it.
Inspired by the incident of 1518 and the indications of Satie, Zoe Balasch promotes a group performance as part of the project Epidemia de Baile, which she has been working on since 2023. On this occasion, she adopts the format of a long-lasting group performance that focuses on states of transit and everything that mutates persistence in dance.
Individual and group patterns, choreographies and structures that develop through insistence, exhaustion and transference between bodies traversed by repetition and immersion in the world of sounds of Vexations through a labyrinth of sound, an intricate and challenging structure, to initiate a journey towards the unexplored.
Xavi Lloses, will follow Satie’s indications for the interpretation of Vexations: playing the piece 840 times, but updating it using a polychromatic timbral palette, with synthesizers, sound effects and other current tools, deconstructing, recoding and remixing the score in real time, with rhythms and textures generating soundscapes for a collective act that allows the veil of the invisible to fall, revealing layers of intangible depths.
