Close Up by Noé Soulier

Linbury Theatre, Royal Ballet and Opera, London
March 20, 2025

Premiered last July at the Avignon Festival, Noé Soulier’s Close Up is a collaborative piece between six dancers and five musicians from the French baroque group, Ensemble il Convito. Based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of Fugue, Soulier explores the relationship between live music, live video and live dance.

As audiences have now come to expect, the skill, technique, and sheer professionalism of the dancers, was second to none. It is a point worth making, that dancers today have a level of technique and accomplishment that was not even dreamed of twenty years ago. They moved fluidly, melting one pas into the next, holding positions, elongating extensions, moving noiselessly around the, deliberately reduced, stage space. Livestreamed video images of the dancers, considerable enlarged, played in real-time behind them.

And yet, Soulier’s choreography neither inspired nor felt innovative. It rather seemed like a long sequence of exercises performed to explore the dimensions of each step, and the effect of the videoing. Thankfully, il Convito played superbly, which helped to alleviate the dullness of the choreography. The lighting, by Kelig Le Bars and Nicholas Bazoge, also added interest.

Following the applause, when the house lights came up, a man in the row in front turned to his companion and said, “Well that was a marathon.” I could not have put it better myself.

Close Up by Noé Soulier was presented as part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels season.