 | REPERTOIRE Coming Together |
Choreography: Nacho Duato
Music: Frederic Rzewski (Coming Together)
Sets and Costumes: Nacho Duato
Light Design: Nicolás Fischtel
World premiere by Compañía Nacional de Danza at Teatro de la Zarzuela, Madrid, December 23th, 1991.
The turbulent repetition of
musical structures and recited
text from Frederic Rzewski’s
frantic composition provides the
accompaniment and counterpoint
to an abstract work by Nacho Duato,
who uses his effervescence both
to bring us closer to frenzy and
hysterics, and as a contrast in
his creation of oniric atmospheres.
Both phenomena appear alternately
as well as simultaneously as could
happen with the rhythms and sensations
of a big city.
The result,
of an obvious contemporary style,
forces the spectator to focus
his attention on the multiple
changes of the choreographic process
as well as on the system and structure
of steps, rather than on the ordinary
descriptive and narrative elements.
Frederic
Rzewski’s piece entitled
Coming Together and Attica, written
for narrator and instruments,
to be performed ad libitum in
two parts, is of crucial importance
in the history of repetitive music
and not only because of its obvious
influence on later pieces. Here
the repetitive techniques and
structuring are not an end in
themselves, but the means of creating
a coherent musical, dramatic world.
While this piece - just
like Rzewski’s other works - makes
use of improvisation and repetition,
it is also a committed work both
in the social and the political
sense. Rzewski managed to combine
the political, ideological meaning
of the text and the musical structure
into a homogeneous whole by means
of an original “minimal” idea.
The
eight sentences from a letter
by Sam Melville (a political
prisoner killed in the 1971 Attica
prison riots) are first narrated
in an additive then in a deductive
progression. The title of the
piece is a reference to a sentence
of the letter and to the technique
of musical improvisation.
