Le Poids des choses
& Peter and the Wolf

Le Poids des choses is an abstract piece based on Rudolf Laban’s Effort system (1947). It questions the nature of movement. It invites the audience (both children and adults) to take a closer look at the dance and offers tools to capture a snapshot of what we are seeing. The dancers show us the space and time in which the movement occurs and the force that our bodies exert to counter that of gravity. They “pretend” you can see time, space, and force in insolation, when it really is impossible to see them separately. As we can see through its light-hearted humour and the seriousness of some of the two children’s thoughts, this piece would finally have us brought back to the complexity of the movement of life.

Through Peter and the Wolf, Dominique Brun offers us a choreographic version of Sergei’s Prokofiev’s (1891-1953) musical tale, endowing the latter with pedagogical virtue. Whilst the key to understanding Prokofiev’s piece lies in a listening to the orchestra, it is Laban’s system of Effort which is at stake when trying to read Brun’s piece. This qualitative system of movement analysis was developed in the 1940s, at the same time as when Prokofiev was writing Peter and the Wolf. Whilst the composer allows us to listen to the orchestra by representing each character as instrument, the chorographer gives each performer a singular dance move. That the dancers’ dynamic actions are developed in this way, allows them to anchor their bodies in the expressive power of the tale and to release the dance from the narration and therefore bring it towards abstraction and poetry.