Flocking-Quintet / Eight Studies for Automatic Piano

In almost complete darkness, piano keys start to play glissandi of mechanical-sounding notes… As with these Eight Studies for Automatic Piano by Seth Horvitz, Flocking-Quintet pushes the limits of our perception. Brice Leroux creates mesmerising shows where the combinatory exhaustion of elementary principles of form ends up generating something irrational. Carefully articulating movement, lighting and sound, his minimalist works are evocative of the displacement of particles, like that of stars, both physical and metaphysical. For his latest creation, the choreographer has developed a method of improvisation inspired by systems of spatial self-organisation seen in groups of animals. Like spinning tops or figures in music boxes, three dancers endlessly spin round themselves and around one other. Materialising a dream of perfect fluidity, they compose a mechanical ballet in tension between the mathematical and the organic. An entrancing show.

Created in Orléans in November 2011

Brice Leroux (b. 1974) studied dance at the Lyon Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse, the Durham American Dance Festival and with the dancers of Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham in New York. In 1994 he settled in Brussels, where after a brief career as a dancer, he devoted himself to choreographic research. He gave numerous unique once-only performances based on structured improvisation at specific locations and under specific circumstances. From 1998 onwards, he manifested himself as a minute and precise writer, presenting productions intended for the theatre. He developed « composition processes » which exhaustively and without repetition expose all possible combinations of a limited set of movements. He always performs his own choreographies and develops daily practice techniques for dancers. He invariably signs for the lighting, stage design and the costumes, which always aim at deforming and magnifying movements with a minimum of effects and resources. Brice Leroux works on the border between visual arts and choreography.

Seth Horvitz (b. 1973, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist, electronic musician, composer and designer whose work focuses on the relationship between human perception, repetating process, and the idiosyncratic behaviour of machines. Most known for his extensive discography as Sutekh, he has produced “paradoxical techno” since the mid-1990s for dozens of record labels including Force Inc./Mille Plateaux (DE), Soul Jazz Records (UK), The Leaf Label (UK), Orthlorng Musork (USA), Creaked (CH), and his own Context Free Media. As a performer, he has appeared at festivals, museums, and nightclubs across the Americas, Europe, Australia, and Japan. Horvitz is a Bachelor in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley and became Master of Arts at Mills College in 2010. He has been presenting his studies for Automatic Piano at major universities, festivals and museums on both coasts of the US. In June 2011 he published his Eight Studies for Automatic Piano.