Since the early 2000s, Yuval Pick has created more than twenty choreographic works. Their writing is based on a matrix or method, called Practice which is both a philosophy of the body and a set of new experiences of the self. From piece to piece, from experimentation to research, Practice gradually takes shape as another way of dancing, inviting the dancers to another perception of their bodies and to a new state of mind freed from certain habits.
Practice , 5 fundamentals
- The rotation of the body,
- The transfer of weight,
- The movement from the center to the peripheries,
- The ‘space between’ as space of play,
- The intention of the movement
Practice proposes to leave the beaten track of dance, to find in each movement its organic and intimate depth. And invites everyone to (re)discover their singular body identity, as well as a freer relationship to space and to others. In this context, it is no longer just a question of a trajectory to follow, a posture to hold, or a technical gesture to execute (in a certain “oblivion of the self”), but of setting the internal and the external in motion, and of intentional actions, marked by subjectivity. I don’t perform a dance or a movement, but by dancing, I involve myself and create new relationships between inside and outside, and within my own body. The action takes place as much in me as out of me, and in between.
« Go forward, but don’t forget the back », Yuval Pick often says. A sentence that sums up a large part of the specificity of Practice. This is a practice that explores what we too often “forget” by projecting ourselves frontally in the sole continuity of our gaze. A body has a front and a back, a volume; each gesture, even virtuoso, is weighted with its gravity. Jumping is also playing with gravity, stretching a leg or an arm, it is also becoming aware of the thickness of the muscles that are mobilized. It is with Practice to dance and “dansifier” ! Dancing the relationship to oneself, the relationship to space, the relationship to the other.
Not to forget the back, nor its volume, nor its weight, Yuval Pick emphasizes the rotation and the image of the spiral. At the center of the spiral, there is the singular weight of the dancer, his specific palpitating flesh, to which he returns again and again with a new distance and a new look. From one turn of the spiral to the next, he invents new ways of deploying them in space, of remodeling them through his movements. Spiral ascending or descending, solitary or group, slow or fast, which always keeps the memory of the archaic and explores-unfolds the intimate sensitivity. Each turn of the spiral is an opportunity to rediscover the pleasures of the most “primitive “ the most buried in itself of the dance, in the very time of the movement in becoming.
Practice invites us to take hold of our intimate and sensitive subjectivity, to go back through the numerous internal and archaic layers (flesh, mass, muscles…) which constitute us in a multitude of strata. But how can this be achieved in practice? By the evocation of plant, mineral, animal or playful images answers Yuval Pick. By means of a “imagined or imaginary body “ which is none other than the expression of a very real body waiting for its creative expansion. The image here reveals, awakens what is buried. For example, we can “land with heart “ or imagine-dance mass transfers within oneself, the light laughter of one’s pond, or the inner shaking of tree water after rain…
The « imaginary body » to explore one’s unconscious body and to create new forms, new movements and to invent new strata. This renewal and enrichment of the relationship to oneself is inseparable from a new relationship to space, where the air, the ground, the depth, are partners almost as sensitive and alive as the dancers. Body of air, body of surface, body of light and shadow. Body in sensitive and continuous dialogue with mine.
It is also inseparable from an in-between-play and an in-between with the other dancers, where “the space-in-between“, this is also a matter to be shaped, an elastic polarity, a field of modulable forces. It is no longer a question of symmetry or complementarity between the dancers, but of new relationships to be invented. The geometry bursts and bursts towards dissonances, counterpoints, dissymmetries. The near and the far, the inside and the outside, the one and the many are exchanged and freed from the usual codes.
