Capture is a piece which is as much music as choreography and video, and whose interpreters interpret it in its entirety (dance, music, images) and not by separating the different artistic fields. The final form is as much a concert as a dance piece or even a live video installation. It is all of these.

On a stage like a cinema proscenium—a very frontal position—are three dancers/musicians, each in his or her “own” space, facing the audience; those spaces are around 3.50 m deep and 2 m wide. Two panels of similar dimensions to the dance spaces separate them and are used as video screens. All the movements of the three dancers are analyzed by web-cams and are used as controls for sound synthesis, in accordance with the existing score. So the dancers actually become the musical interpreters of the piece.

The capturing of their movements is also used to control the real-time generation of the projected video—which is another instrument written down in the score, but a silent one. No pre-recorded sounds, no samples, no sequences—the three dancers are the sole musicians of Capture. The piece is a little less than 77 minutes long.

One of the main ideas in Capture is to define the specificity of what composition is: not a realization (which is only one of the possible renderings) but a “pure” vision of the considered project. The fact that this vision is proposed by a musician and is realized in the field of choreography—in other words that a proposition for dance comes from somebody outside the envisaged domain—is certainly an interesting detail, but it is not the main thing. The notion of writing, writing “at the table”, that is without recourse to reality as it can be represented by an instrument, is far more developed in the field of music than in dance, where the idea depends much too often on the body and its possibilities. The use of a meta-language free of the constraints or characteristics of a specific language is certainly a powerful tool of creation, as it facilitates the conception of structures without limiting them with the language of the art in question. The (silent) score allows musical composition outside the field of sound, developing a greater freedom of thought here than is possible with instruments; the passage from the written idea to its realization then becomes a factor of progress, either purely technical (the use of multiphonic sounds on wind instruments, harmonics on the strings), or organologic (the elongation of the fingerboard of the violin, change of the fingering system of the flute, invention from scratch of the saxophone or the bass clarinet). However, with the appearance of these new instruments that are computers (in a concert situation) and more generally with electronic music, one sees how traditional writing marks time but no longer knows how to convey the musical idea.

Capture team: Myriam Gourfink, Carole Garriga, Cindy Van Acker (dance), Silvère (artistic-technical coordination), Dominik Barbier (video creation).

Kasper T Toeplitz (FR) is a composer, electric bass player and musician who has developed his work in the no-man’s-land between “academic” composition (orchestra, ensembles, opera) and electronic “new music” or “noise music”. He also works with experimental or unclassifiable musicians and directs his own ensemble which does not have a name, and is made up of musicians who have the same musical preoccupations.