Both Sitting Duet
23/10/2006
, 
22:30
with Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion
with the support of The Arts Council of England, Jonathan Burrows Group, NOTT Dance Festival (England), Kaaitheater (Bruxelles), PARTS/Rosas and the Laban Center of London
duration 45 minutes
BOTH SITTING DUET
example of delicate musical composition for hands and arms
A choreographer (Jonathan Burrows) and a composer (Matteo Fargion), sit, side by side, on two chairs, and perform with absolute precision and concentration a music composition for the body, reading it from a score. Hands turn and intersect in the space, respecting the rhythm, fingers move tiptoeing on breast. Arms and legs, with their animated dialogue between rhythm, sound and gesture contest the role of the choreographer and the one of the composer, demonstrating their equity. The two men sitting duet stay in silence, playing the same piece by Morton Feldman, For John Cage, but the scores laying on the floor in front of them are different: Fargion’s one is full of music notes, Burrow’s one is full of numbers. The rhythmic counterpoint they perform is the result of their equal participation to the creation of a dance capable to evoke not only the possibilities of body in movement, but also the immense vocabulary of imagination. So, even a skinny and non-conventional work like Both Sitting Duet, opens to a radical and rigorous minimalism, which is the signature and aesthetic vision that Burrows has elaborated in the years after his beginning as a dancer in the traditional Royal Ballet. In the fusion of dance and music, Burrows and Fargion create a discipline which can be defined “musical choreography”, which, through movements, generates uniform, rhythmic, concordant or alternate sounds, in which the attention is not fit in the importance of hands, but is distributed in every single detail, in every fibre of body, every understanding look or mischievous smile, in which even the creak of the chairs is essential to the economy of the performance.
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