INVENTIONS

INVENTIONS Creation for theaters & singular spaces After more than a decade exploring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Mal Pelo presents Inventions, the third piece of the Bach Project Inventions is an outbreak of the work conceived and matured in previous shows (Bach, On Goldberg Variations / Variations) where we analyzed and deepened the listening and visualization of the structures, harmonies, voices and development of the music of J.S. Bach. A study which, for many years and many hours of research, has questioned the dialogue between dance and Baroque counterpoint music. Inventions is a work on the search for spirituality, but also for the worldly, on unanswered questions, on the temporal paradox of man faced with the deep time of history. A sound and visual journey where the spectator feels the strength of the group in space, the presence of the individual, and where the mixture of different disciplines summons a plural body, ready to be inhabited and crossed. Sacred, solemn, vitalistic, worldly, and sometimes surreal, Inventions is a dance performance, but also a spiritual refuge built on the music of Bach. The word breaks out amid dance and music with lyrics by John Berger, Erri de Luca and Nick Cave. Mal Pelo creates an amalgama of elements woven through a reflective and intense show performed by an exceptional cast. A concert of space, body and music. At each location, Inventions will take on a different form suited to the particular site. We work with the depth and height of the space, with the sound, ensuring good visibility for the public. We work with the specificity of the space for a few days to discover and unveil the scenic and sound potential. Inventions also performs in conventional theaters. The first part of this new project took place in 2020 in the following festivals: Festival Grec Barcelona, the Festival Internacional Temporada Alta de Girona, The Grande Halle de La Vilette in collaboration with the Théâtre de la Ville de Paris and the Festival d’Avignon 2023.

LA MUSIQUE The music weaves together fragments of the Cantatas with parts of the Partita II (with special emphasis on the version of the Ciaccona for quartet of voices and violin) and selected pieces from the version for string quartet of the Art of the Fugue. The musical director is Joel Bardolet, while Quiteria Muñoz leads the quartet of lyric voices under his general direction. Fanny Thollot, composer and sound engineer, creates a soundscape to accompany the baroque music that creates landscapes from it and picks out details of the space, moving the sound into different zones of perception and working on its distribution and dimensions. Discovering the resonance of spaces becomes an exercise, not only in listening to the quality of the music, but also in experience and perception. The sound transforms the space and lends it poetic qualities that are intangible but undeniable. The sound inhabits the space just as we humans do, and reveals fictions, evocations and landscapes that resonate with us. Just as the space changes the sound, so the sound changes us, who change the space, in a circle of influence that we can note and allow to form part of the drama of the piece. Our ongoing research into these influences forms the basis for the construction of each proposal for each new space. The group of musicians and dancers take part in this quest, both physically and through their personalities on stage. What is Inventions? Is it a metaphor, a dream world, a fantasy? In the space where it is presented, the dramatic line that separates the space here from the beyond, the imaginary, has a visible expression. Musically, the issues and limits of reading a text composed in the 18th century from Europe in 2021 raise the same doubts: What is Bach’s music for us? Is it a metaphor, a dream world, a fantasy? Maybe music and its context are two symbiotic elements, all music is good if it has a function. In our case, we didn’t make an aesthetic and decorative choice of music, but we immersed ourselves in deep listening for months until we found the heart of every piece we used in the show. Inventions and transformed it at the same time. Bach’s music is extraordinary for the quantity of qualities of its ingredients: rhetoric, craftsmanship, inspiration, dramatic force and also beauty – we are not afraid to speak of beauty. Gyorgy Kurtag says “In Bach’s music, there is a prayer at every moment…” “…In a Bach fugue, where there is the crucifixion, you hear the nails. » It is this poetic force that we wanted to highlight and put at the service of the choral piece Inventions. By seeing the music resonate in the bodies of the dancers, we learned both the meaning of this music and of analysis and listening. Through Bach’s music we visit different moments of his life: the Weimar period with his cantata 150, the death of his wife Barbara at the Chaconne as a tomb dedicated to her, his own sunset with Fugue XIV of the Art of Fugue, unfinished, and with a note in the score of his son Carl Philipp: “Über dieser Fuge, wo der Name B A C H im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben. (“In this fugue, when the name BACH appears as a countersubject, the composer is dead.”) Different motifs accompany us in a subtle or more obvious way, such as Chorale 85 “Ist got mein schutz und treuer Hirt” (To my protection and my faithful shepherd) which appears at different times of the journey and in different points following a experimentation that is always respectful of music and its possibilities. The musical work of Inventions is a choral work where we played with an immense quantity and quality of material and among the whole team of dancers and musicians, we made our choice which became our soundtrack Joel Bardolet (Musical direction)

THE SPACE The aim of Inventions is to seek out the particular sound and performance characteristics of each place, the architecture and dynamics of the space where we are performing the piece.We look into the history, materials, light, resonance and capacity for transformation of the chosen venues. Listening out for these features makes possible a process of revelation of performance potential and the construction of unique proposals tailored to the surroundings. A space offers us its life, its building materials, its light and the presence of the people who have inhabited it. A process of immersion that through documentation, listening and imagination allows us to reveal the sometimes hidden poetry of each place, of each space. We work with the possibility of using natural light, the sedimentation of the layers and traces left by time, and paying special attention to the framing of the piece, the angle and point of view of the spectator. All artistic forms are specific ways of thought; they represent ways of thinking sensorially and corporally that are characteristic of every artistic medium. A way of making existential and metaphysical philosophy through space, structure, matter, gravity and light. Singular buildings express our own experience. Juhani Pallasmaa architec

“Mental images are registered in the same part of the brain as visual perceptions, and have all the authenticity of experiences seen by our own eyes.” Juhani Pallasmaa architect

Presantation of Inventions