Chapter 5 A Dancer’s Discourse: Noé Soulier Choreographs Virginia Woolf
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Abstract
This chapter triangulates Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), choreographer Noé Soulier’s dance piece of the same name (2018), and Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), in order to crystallise and sharpen questions of dance and narrative in the 21st century. How can we think the relationship between dance and narration after more than one hundred years during which dancerly storytelling, if not entirely abandoned, has been problematised and reformulated in fundamental ways? Are there new modes of narrative within a strand of contemporary dance that is not only conceptually driven, but also eminently movement-based? And what happens when this kind of dance expressly engages with literature, such as Soulier’s The Waves? Taking its cues from Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis that with the waning of experience storytelling too is coming to an end, the chapter argues that the consciously crafted retrieval of experiential layers of corporeality in Soulier’s choreography leads to a new kind of telling in 21st-century dance. This telling includes narrative elements, for instance excerpts from Woolf’s The Waves, but it reaches beyond the model of the story to engage in phenomenological and conceptual aspects of movement that create relatable and relational physico-conceptual settings.