Les Taroupes (2000) marked Karine Ponties’ first collaboration with Jan Kuijken, composer in residence at Het muziek Lod. Kuijken will perform an original piece for piano, which he composed mainly during improvisation sessions with dancers Alessandro Bernardeschi and Mauro Paccagnella. The close relationship that develops between them gives rise to a subtle and highly organic music.
Two identities
Two copies
Only one in two parts
The tireless intertwining of opposites
The caress of the animate whole
One corrects the other, makes it relative, completes it, and by denying a centre prevents the establishment of certainty,
Any dialectic, effort, struggle, movement, progress or fatigue rests on duality.
Les Taroupes are the little hairs that grow at the base of the nose and between the eyes, hairs that seem to oppose one another in a duel, as their follicles are always symmetrically opposite. This is also the metaphor that Karine Ponties has chosen for presenting two characters on stage. Dressed in black trousers and white shirts, two men who may be characterised as average wait—one standing, the other seated. The music triggers the movement of the first, which in turn sets the other in motion. Moving along parallel paths, they remain distant with no apparent connection and no eye contact. At once identical and opposite, they seem intent on avoidance until they inevitably confront each other face to face. They are driven by imperceptible tensions provoked by the presence of the other. Set to the rhythms of live music, the relationship is marked by approach and rejection, attempt and withdrawal, domination and submission, as the two unidentified elements search for each other but fail to achieve recognition. Their respective gestures and movements remain a source of mystery, resulting in an endless interplay between opposites. Yet so little would be required to bring them together, to have them hold each other in a unique, furtive form that borders on abstraction. The music represents the external element that alone makes this unity possible, revealing that each is a part of the other—that part which is obscured.
