The Game of Life

The sextet The Game of Life for three musicians and three dancers aims to find new relationships between music and dance on stage. The ensemble L’Instant Donné premieres this work with music by the French composer Pierre-Yves Macé together with the contemporary dance company Le principe d’incertitude, made possible by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

The title of the piece, The Game of Life, is an allusion to the simulation game conceived by the English mathematician John Horton Conway, in which groups of cells develop from iteration to iteration, based on simple rules that nevertheless produce complex patterns. The Game of Life processes this principle: an analysis of the environment takes place at a particular moment, which determines the state of the system at the next moment. A trio of musicians and a trio of dancers act as organelles of a cell that metabolises and reproduces itself incessantly.

The music is interpreted by three light and mobile instruments: Flute, percussion, and violin, complemented by an electronic device that combines real-time processing and the diffusion of pre-recorded sounds. The bodies of the instrumentalists blend with the presence of the dancers, so that the audience no longer perceives the separation between musicians and dancers. The music is constructed through a play of structures that sometimes unfold independently, sometimes converge to create an unprecedented complexity. Pierre-Yves Macés aims to illustrate the variability of structures, the construction of an architecture in real time and the immediate interaction between music and dance, movement and sound, the physical body and the sound body.

Further information:
instantdonne.net

Dates

November 22, 2022
Centre National de Danse Contemporaine, Angers