Well, the spoken word piece is definitely a little — shall we say, instagram-ish. I can just imagine Guillaume coming across it in the middle of a Spotify "inspirational songs to work out to" playlist.
I understand what they liked in it, and it certainly fits within their main themes, but they are so many actual poets who have treated them better that I wish they had just paid someone with a nice voice to recite something into a mic for them. Perhaps
something by Pablo Neruda, or, on the subject of French poetry :agree:, something like Paul Verlaine's "Il faut, voyez-vous, nous pardonner les choses". Come to think of it, pretty much all of Verlaine would fit the bill, and now I'm making myself sad, imagining the possibilities...
With that said, I was also unimpressed by the music of last season's FD (the voice, the melody, and the lyrics), and I thought they never rose above it, merely maximized its potential. I am much more optimistic about this season's FD, in the sense that I already think, in this early stage, that their concept and choreographic choices rise above the base material. I don't demand from them that they share my exact artistic taste, or even good taste in music; where I do expect excellence is in their skating. I know many people reject contemporary dance as inherently pretentious or worse, cringe-worthy (I have much the same reaction to modern plastic arts), but I enjoy it very much, and accordingly I am overjoyed that they have found their way back to the road they set out on in 2016 with Oddudua. Unfettered by the constraints of storytelling and surface emotional impact, they can approach their choreography in a purely architectural manner — the relation of movement to the spoken word (or in Oddudua to the discordant piano) rather than the ordered melodies of their classical FDs; the crescendo building from the juxtaposition of contraction and release, staccato and fluidity (Martha Graham much?). The re-ordering of their elements, the departure from their "floaty" aesthetic all seem to me to prove their earnest intention to shake things up, to be more modern... even if it comes in a hipster-esque package.
At the end of the day, as I have said many times before in this thread, I believe there are skaters wasted on anything but the best classical music, and I place Gabi and Guillaume, alongside Mao, in that category. But the field of ID today is not what I would call known for its refined music taste, and a slightly cringey slam poem will do me quite nicely against the likes of Justin Timberlake covers and A Star is Born soundtracks.
Pastels it is. Let me know if there's anything google translate doesn't clear up.
