Do grace and virtuosity come at a cost? And what about beauty? “What human and emotional sacrifices must we make to achieve them?” asks dance and performance artist Charlie Prince. With his longtime friend, author Olivia Tapiero, with whom he shares a passion for classical music, he sketches the beginnings of an answer. Concerto thus establishes a parallel between the protocol of classical music and the ongoing ecological and political disasters. “It is as if, unfortunately, the world orchestra had tuned itself to this frequency where we are subject to expectations, to demands for perfection, for performance,” says Olivia Tapiero, who admits that, even if these associations are not natural, it is nonetheless essential to put them in relation.
Concerto is, in fact, a concert in good and due form, from beginning to end. “But a kind of gutted concert that takes the form of a sonata,” warns Charlie Prince. The Piano Concerto No.o 23 by Mozart, which the pair partly reworked for the occasion, becomes, for example, one of the haunted witnesses of this show that is more alive than ever. “It opens with a great sound charge with a link that is created between sound and space,” adds Olivia Tapiero. For her, the fact of producing a few sonorities on stage — music, perhaps? — thus establishes a slowed-down, contemplative temporality, conducive to reflection more than to discussion. “We can say that Concerto is a concert with landscapes that change through our interventions,” says Charlie Prince. Intriguing. “In fact, what we see is perhaps what we shouldn’t see,” he whispers. What is it about? “We are constantly exposed to images of violence while having to keep a certain rhythm,” replies his collaborator. As if nothing had happened. “And virtuosity is also that: continuing to go very quickly and very well, even if everything collapses around us,” she says.
A sideways glance
Never show things directly, however, but rather suggest them on stage through projections and choreographies. “Out of respect for these things, but also because I think it has never been clearer: showing images changes nothing,” says Olivia Tapiero, referring to the profusion of images online, some of which aim to alert the West to the ongoing massacres in Palestine, Congo and Sudan. “Our work, individually and artistically, is committed work,” maintains Charlie Prince. For them, it is impossible to continue to create as if nothing had happened, always as if nothing had happened. “It is important for us to think now about how we can serve as a mirror for people,” he says. Recognizing the current state of the world is therefore a first step in this direction.
To do this, Charlie Prince and Olivia Tapiero set out to deconstruct virtuosity. “This is when classical music becomes a metonymic object, a metaphor,” Olivia Tapiero emphasizes, while Charlie Prince emphasizes the clash that it induces with the decay of societies. “From now on, violence is no longer hidden, because if it was more insidious in the past, there, the veneer is no longer required: people tended to be ashamed of being racist ten years ago, now they can just be racist,” believes the author. And she immediately recalls: “The condition of the glory of the protocol of Western classical music is the apogee of the Empire, itself conditioned by the enslavement of other peoples and colonization.” However, how can we express it without giving lessons, without forcing interpretation, or even rejecting or trampling on classical music? This is what is at stake in Concerto. “Of course, it’s a bit darkbecause there is still a thread of mourning that runs through the room,” she mentions.
The observations of Olivia Tapiero and Charlie Prince are thus materialized by bodies, their own. “There is a certain brutality in what is presented and in the changes of state between a very slow, fluid body and a technical, functional body, which must do its things,” she notes, while the show was conceived as a staging of the audience’s capacity to be a witness, and only a witness. “But it still remains oblique,” confides Olivia Tapiero, since it is neither a conference nor a spoken text. “It is another language,” believes the author. According to her, classical music in the context of the show embodies a strategy of resistance that cannot be recovered, by anything or anyone. For his part, Charlie Prince is convinced that there is probably nothing more to say about what has already been said. “That’s it. It’s time to live,” he concludes.