Listen & see
Invited to open the DepARTures Festival in Munich in November 2023, Cindy Van Acker imagined Sunfish – a highly sensitive collection of extracts from existing works, set to the sounds of her collaborator and friend Mika Vainio, who passed away in 2017. Since Kernel in 2007, the choreographer had been lucky enough to work on several creations with this incredible musician and pioneer of electronic music. They worked together for 10 years, and his death came as a shock to her. “His music reaches every cell of my body and sets me in motion; it is completely intertwined with my ideas about dance. Nothing will ever be the same.” Thanks to a breathtaking montage, Sunfish truly is its own show – like an intense capture of bodies that are constantly reacting to an encounter with sound. Layers, vibrations, beats… At the heart of this body of work is Van Acker’s solo Knusa/Insert Coins (2016), constructed in osmosis with Vainio’s sounds. This highly tense piece is the first in a meticulous exploration of the interwoven textures of movement and electronics, where micro-changes in the duration, attack, or interruption of a gesture can give the impression that it is the sound that controls the movement, or vice versa. These simultaneous or triggering interactions open up a space of suspense that literally captivates the attention. In addition to the choreographer, Sunfish features four magnificent performers (Stéphanie Bayle, Matthieu Chayrigues, Yuta Ishikawa, and Daniela Zaghini), all virtuosos capable of materialising the multiple layers of music and making them heard through movement in a dazzling, dance-based journey to the heart of electronic music. — MP
