David Lang and Édouard Lock: Post-minimalist music in contemporary dance

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of the functioning of post-minimalist music in contemporary dance. On the example of the creative collaboration between the American composer David Lang and the Canadian choreographer Édouard Lock, the author examines the interaction of the choreographic and musical components in their performances. The masters carried out four projects in the genre of contemporary dance – Exaucé / Salt (1999), Amelia (2002), Andre Auria (2006) and Amjad (2007). Lang and Lock were united by common aesthetic views on art, the free crossing of boundaries between academic and popular culture, a return to the origins of the language and, at the same time, the rigid rationalism of its organization, and the principled work with repetitive technique. An important expressive technique of Lang and Lock’s joint productions was the contrast of musical and plastic: neutral sound material, laconic diatonic patterns performed by the instrumental trio/quartet set off the extreme speed and automatic precision of movements at the limit of human capabilities inherent in choreography. The greatest attention is paid to the ballet Amelia, translated by Lock into the cinematic genre of film dance. Lang complements the piano trio with a vocal part: a female voice voices the lyrics of five songs by American rock musician Lou Reed. The appearance of the word expands the boundaries of the genre, and also introduces new semantic accents into the content. Unlike the “classical phase” of minimalism in the 1960s, post-minimalism began to absorb a variety of stylistic and emotional overtones, which, while maintaining repetitive technique, formed fertile ground for its expressive and free choreographic interpretation