In Grosse Fugue, which will be presented as part of Lyon Opera Ballet’s program at The Joyce, choreographer Maguy Marin explores the body caught “between the force of life emanating from the female existence and the state of enthusiasm and desperation of [Beethoven’s] music”. In this video, taken on the occasion of Grosse Fugue’s presentation at the 2008 Dance Biennial in Lyon, Marin takes time from rehearsals to discuss our relationship with time.

Marin says (here excerpted and translated from the original French) “The questions of past, future and present are there since the beginning of the world. They are always there to re-work on them and I think it is always important to return to these questions and to think about them. And I don’t mean think about them in one specific moment but now and again return to them, to constantly be in those back and forths, like a vibration that is always conscious of what it is made of, built of what people have already deposited, what they have said and done, their work. And then it is also a matter of what do we invent, what we deposit for those to come. So it is in this knitting, this vibration of the present between past and future that things are created, that they become and remain alive. […]
When we work in a space, the space is filled by all the people who have worked there before, all the musicians, dancers, choreographers, painters, everybody. They are all there. The difficulty is to make them get out, to tell them please leave me some space, but without sending them away. Yes that’s it, we have to make a bit of space but at the same time everyone is there we never invent all alone, we copy from others and then re-invent”.

Lyon Opera Ballet performs Marin’s Grosse Fugue, along with William Forsythe’s Duo and Merce Cunnigham’s Beach Birds at The Joyce, March 9-14.