Noé Soulier

How do dancers deal with aging, and what are the experiences they have had? On discovering the career of the dancer Frédéric Tavernini, who had worked for Maurice Béjart, Mats Ek, Trisha Brown, William Forsythe, or Angelin Prejlocaj, Noé Soulier wanted to draw a portrait of him: a personal history in which gestures express the works that had been traversed – marking their accents, points and articulations. Between perception and the signification of movement, Noé Soulier pursues his work of deciphering dance by examining the descriptive value of a gesture: can a dancer’s body portray a dance, show it and narrate it, without actually carying it out? As the questions proceed, attention is drawn to the reconstitution of these dance memories, from the signs they have left behind in the flesh of the performer. By following Frédéric Tavernini step by step, Noé Soulier draws up a story revealing the implicit discourse of movement.

Noé Soulier studied at the National Ballet School of Canada and PARTS in Brussels. He received a master degree in philosophy at La Sorbonne University (Paris IV) and took part in the Palais de Tokyo’s residency program: Le Pavillon. In the trio Little Perceptions he started an ongoing research on ways of defining movement. With the solo Movement on Movement (2013), he dissociates gestures from speech to question how they collaborate to create meaning. In 2014, he explored the syntax of ballet vocabulary with Corps de ballet. He created Movement Materials for Fondation Louis Vuitton opening (2014), Faits et gestes at PACT Zollverein (2016), Performing Art (2017) and Les Vagues (2018) as part of Festival d’Automne à Paris. As one of the CN D associate artiste, he published Actions, mouvements et gestes, a choreographic research that takes the form of a book, and created his most recent performance, Portrait de Frédéric Tavernini, was created at CN D Pantin this spring 2019.