Where does the music come to us from ?

It is born out of the inside of the body and our internal life rhythms. It is essential to us. It belongs to us. For years we have developed relationships with it : for creating, virtuosity, in order to belong. It was stolen from us. We stole music from ourselves and it is a part of us that we lack. Just as we lack, inseparable from music, silence.

It is this theft that I would like to deal with, through all the perversions that we keep in our relationships to music. Sweetness, ecstasy, banality, slavery, deviation, submission, flight, from oneself, from one’s own silence. From one’s own music. I see this performance like a voyage taking us to the unrecognized shores of our perceptions. A voyage about loss and reunion. A path towards our senses, thanks to dance, bodies, origins of this music.

Dance will do what it is supposed to do: make and keep us sensitive. So, no looking back (“Happy the blessed time when music was rare…”); no moral, no lesson. The same way we treated “Study in Lightness”, with no more narrative or weight. In speaking of music, this performance will speak of silence. The vibrations of silence. Like a picture by Agnès Martin. How to speak of silence ? On paper, on stage ? Keep still, write no more, dance, make a mark in space, and then disappear.

In Brazil, Summer 1998, during a two-month Experimental Residency.

The music – if one can call it that ! – was unbearable, intolerable, inadmissible. Brazilians have a reputation of being perpetually into parties, music and dance. But what aberration did we witness ! Everywhere – in the street, on the beach – a sort of musical mush, Americanized, blasting, follows you. I experienced it as an aggression of great violence, an attack on my personal space. Pushed to the extreme, this situation seemed to be established, unbeknownst to us, in our daily life, too. This visceral, violent reaction gradually transformed upon reflection, thanks to a book that I happened to have with me, Pascal Quignard’s La Haine de la Musique. This performance is the result of these reflections. In creating a new piece, I need to both know and not know where we are going. It is this razor’s edge, tricky to obtain, that allows for a genuine creative act. Especially in dance, where writing happens in the moment, with the performers. Therefore, the parameters are set; and being set, change by themselves. But the final outcome, the images produced, must stay open and modifiable according to the process. We come back to the process of investigation that made “Study in Lightness” such a success: keeping the shaping of the performance open as much as possible, so that it can impose itself, and come out of the process. Philippe Saire

Through his love of music, Philippe Saire hates certain “music” more and more. [..] An astonishing work. We very quickly realize that to create a show dealing with a hatred for a certain type of music, the first essential is to experience the love of other sounds. To love their rhythms, in this case the rhythms of dancers’ feet, of their breathing, of their cries: to love this music above all for the joy and the exaltation that, mysteriously, it arouses. In a memorable scene, to the music of a Gypsy band the red and orange-clad dancers leap and hurtle through the air, rebounding and colliding in a fiery reminder of Kusturica. Then suddenly the atmosphere changes: the music shows its shadow side, dark, deadening and dominating. One dancer, armed only with a remote control that symbolizes the technological invasion of our lives, pitilessly sends another around and around like a dumb beast until, at the limit of exhaustion, the victim collapses.
Anna Hohler, Le Temps (CH) 2000

The Hatred of Music in triumph in Zurich Philippe Saire’s new work for 11 dancers sets a landmark on the Swiss dance scene. Amusing, sexy and youthful, it breaks away from previous styles. Rewarded by a standing ovation lasting ten minutes the new Philippe Saire creation The Hatred of Music was one of the most remarkable events of the “Steps” dance festival in Lucerne at the beginning of May. In contrast to its forerunners such as Lightness, or Life and Morals of a Night Chameleon, the new piece is amusing, sexy and youthful. [..] Seen against the somewhat intellectual orientation of Philippe Saire’s previous works, it addresses an astonishingly different range of moods, revealing in the process the richness of its potential. It begins curiously with two numbers that parody the karaoke craze – superbly done by Manuel Chabanis and Anne Delahaye, one of the company’s five new dancers – and ends with another reference to this form of entertainment. Karaoke in contemporary dance? With Philippe Saire of course, we travel well off the beaten track, but it could perhaps be asked where he intends to lead us. Into caricature? Satire? Mockery of what passes today for music? Or of dance, even ? [..] The humour of the work does not disguise its precise timing – it runs as regularly as a Swiss watch. The cast is well-knit and brilliantly costumed, and this latest creation is an example of the healthy state of Swiss choreography today.
Patrice Lefrançois, 24 Heures (CH) 2000