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The production HEAR EYES MOVE. Dances with Ligeti by Elisabeth Schilling will be presented as part of the Festival ” On (y) danse aussi l’été ! “, at the invitation of Isabelle Martin-Bridot, director of Les Hivernales – CDCN d’Avignon and with the support of Kultur | lx, the TROIS C-L – Centre de Création Chorégraphique Luxembourgeois and the Ministry of Culture. This programme completes the Luxembourg selection for the 2023 Avignon Festival OFF.

Created in 2020, HEAR EYES MOVE. Dances with Ligeti choreographically interpretes all 18 Etudes pour Piano by renowned composer György Ligeti, which is unprecedented to date. Devised for 5 dancers and accompanied live on piano by Cathy Krier (ECHO Rising Star), HEAR EYES MOVE. Dances with Ligeti is envisioned as a dance-concert concert-dance full of captivating multi-sensorial imagery.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Ligeti’s death in 2023, the show will resume its international broadcast, and will be performed on the Hivernales stage from Sunday 9 to Wednesday 19 July in a version adapted to the conditions of the Festival, notably with an audio recording by Cathy Krier whose piano cannot be accommodated on the Hivernales stage.

Have ever two forms of art entered a closer and more intricate relationship than music and dance? But how does music actually move? How does dance sound? And where do these sounds and movements meet, once they are liberated from their purported duty to mimic or mirror, to illustrate, to produce an atmosphere, to provide a backdrop, or even to merely coexist, in neat separation?

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti said of his virtuosic Études pour piano that in the process of composition “tactile concepts were almost as important as acoustic ones”. The movements and developments of music, in other words, are not merely a matter of hearing but of sensation, they come to be felt “as a tactile form, as a succession of muscle tensions”. Through these forms and successions, Ligeti’s pieces thus behave like “growing organisms”, and it is following this line of thought that the choreographer Elisabeth Schilling has created an unprecedented take to choreographically interpret those Etudes pour piano. Treating dance and music as contiguous forms that grow alongside and into each other, Elisabeth has produced, together with five dancers and the pianist Cathy Krier, a dance-concert and a concert-dance full of captivating multi-sensorial imagery.

Biography
Elisabeth Schilling is a dancer and choreographer. In close collaboration with an international team and across various collaborations, she develops transdisciplinary projects between movement, design, visual arts and music, making the disciplines dance among themselves and with each other.

We have thus tasked ourselves with making contemporary dance happen in established dance spaces as well as in unusual places. Accordingly, our productions tour European metropolises as well as more rural areas, black box theaters as well as museums, galleries, concert halls, historic buildings and public spaces. Dance is thus, almost in passing, rendered accessible to a new public.

At the same time, an important part of our work consists in different formats of creative learning, audience engagement and development. For each production, we develop an accompanying framing programme for various audiences, ranging from specifically devised post-performance discussions with the audience to accompanying workshops, symposia and catalogues.