Emanuel Gat | Awir Leon. SUNNY

About

Emanuel Gat returns to Tanz im August! For his new piece “SUNNY,” which will premiere at this year’s Dance Biennale in Venice, Gat cooperates with producer, musician and performer Awir Leon, a shooting star of today’s Electronic Music scene and former member of Gat’s dance company. “SUNNY” is both a live concert and an exploration of dance: it consists of free-floating forms that oscillate between new sounds and potential choreography in order to create an experience of artistic synesthesia.

A French critic once described Emanuel Gat’s choreographies as “visual music, interpreted through the body.” Gat was on track of becoming a composer and conductor when he discovered his passion for dance at the age of twenty-three. Ever since, he has worked to fuse the arts of sound and motion: he choreographed salsa steps to the music of Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring” and engaged his dancers in interpretations of John Coltrane’s French folklore songs and Squarepusher’s music. In “Brilliant Corners,” a piece that Gat presented at Tanz im August in 2011, he combined highly structured improvisations with a self-compiled sound collage to create an intensely emotional and yet unpretentious work of art that was inspired by the great work of Jazz pianist Thelonius Monk.

Ever since Gat founded his dance company in 2004, he has refined and expanded his approaches to choreography and dance. In his pieces, he lets things happen rather than plan them out: instead of relying on fixed step patterns, Gat understands dance as an evolving, emerging phenomenon – a momentary experience of natural beauty, like watching the flight of a flock of birds or the common movement made by crowds. His choreographies become, in the moment of their emergence, living artifacts. His dancers’ movements create a vibrant room that visualizes the sensual interplay of structures and emotions.