Unstill Life, the two-man dance and pianistic portrait with Benjamin Millepied and Alexandre Tharaud is an evening length work with many moving parts. Part concert, part documentary, part portrait of a friendship, and part ocean going dance odyssey, the hour and fifteen-minute program encompasses an affectionate look at two artists lifting one another, urging one another on, and exploring a deep well of sound, film, and movement. It is the sort of theater piece that with others might add up simply to a sum of its parts but here telescopes into a breathtakingly rich and unexpected universe.
At its true center Unstill Life reflects a detailed and fantastically sensitive connection to the music itself, for it is the music that drives the work forward, while proving that dance too has the power to amplify what is embedded in the music rather than simply mimicking or playing along. It begins as you might guess, two French artists set off with the decidedly French music of Jean-Philippe Rameau, a gavotte and a set of six variations from the A minor suite. It’s a greatest hits piece of sorts, full of Baroque filigree, keyboard virtuosity, and Renaissance cadences. Millepied with his own version of a modernized Baroque movement captures the detail, speed, and restraint of it all. It’s free, but also practiced and in black pants and tank top Millepied travels an enormous distance from the fussy courtly moves and attire of the music’s origins without losing any of its style or gestural eloquence.
Unstill Life has a long musical arc. From Rameau to the fractured and tortuous two movements of the last of the Beethoven late period sonatas, the work wends its way through three pieces by Satie, a Bach Partita, and two Schubert Impromptus from opus 90. The final sonata is nearly 30 minutes by itself. Tharaud plays it all in the rarified style that he has carved out in hisperformance and recording career. You may know the pieces but you don’t know them quite this way. For Millepied the arc moves from the joyous, easy-going lightness and pure dance of Rameau to an explosion of sorts into the audience during the Beethoven sonata. A hand-held camera with a remote projection to a small on-stage screen follows him on stage and then into the recesses of the concert hall. These are techniques he has worked with in some of his other pieces. But here it supports as good a visual escalation of the sonic extremes of any of the late Beethoven compositions as you might want to see. He finally returns to the stage in a collapse onto Tharaud’s shoulders. With the Beethoven we end with the sane familiar structure where we began, an aria and a set of variations that recalls the design of Rameau’s gavotte but the journey getting there has been arduous, exhausting, and artistically, generous.
The interior of the work finds Millepied operating a hand-held camera in a long circling shot of Tharaud playing the first impromptu. In the second he dances a humor filled, dashing effort to keep up with the cascading triples of the music. In the final Satie Gnossienne he takes up a position lounging dreamily under the piano. In the Partita the two dance together in a touching moment while we hear and on-stage record player and a recording of Tharaud. In another section of the Partita Millepied operates a hand-held camera focused on the pianist using his intertwining hands to embody dance. Short, spoken documentary segments and a Chaplinesque film of the two friends meeting on the streets of Paris are also woven into the narrative.
Unstill Life moves along faultlessly in its narrative, all of it finely integrated, moving from music, to dance, to storytelling without anything ever feeling out of place, too much, or too little. It begins with Millepied warming up on stage, headphones on, some dancing, working beside the piano like a session at the barre. We are reminded that this is where all dancing of this sort begins. Millepied shows us not only a sweeping understanding of music and how movement informs it but a very human understanding of how to make it accessible as well. He looked great in all of it, from the fleet feet of the Rameau to the fast turns and expansive jumps in the Partita and the jazzy adaptations in the second movement of the Beethoven sonata. Here is a dancer who has held on to the best of his ballet beginnings and transformed the rest of it into movement you can take home with you.
The program finished back on the streets of Paris with a once through, nostalgic, improvised vignette of La Vie en Rose.
( The reviewed performance took place on April 9, 2024 at Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Unstill Life was first performed in Lyon in 2023. Loïc Barrère was the dramaturge for the program which was produced with Los Angeles Dance Project. The photos are by Farah Sosa, for the LA Philharmonic. Millepied is the artistic director of LA Dance Project. Unstill Life marks his return to performance after a decade long break. His first feature film, Carmen, was released in 2023. You can listen to Tharaud’s performance of the Rameau gavotte and doubles by clicking the highlighted text.)
Los Angeles Dance Review 