Emanuel Gat

Emanuel Gat celebrates his 30-year anniversary as a choreographer with a hymn to freedom. Freedom Sonata celebrates dance as a method of exploring our society in movement: “I’ve never created anything to COMMENT on the world, I’ve always created to UNDERSTAND the world.“ And what the Israeli choreographer, who now lives and works in Marseille, wants to understand is the distribution of power and resources, the growth of totalitarianism and the tension between individuals and communities. Two musical inspirations provide the structure and soundtrack for this “choreographic sonata“: the second movement from Ludwig van Beethoven’s last piano sonata No. 32 in C minor, op. 111, whose rhythmic complexity has been with Gat for a long time and Kanye West’s multi-layered hip-hop album The Life of Pablo. For Gat, renowned for the compact and intense nature of his work, dance offers a way of visualising human experiences and relationships and reconceiving our lives together in utopian terms. In Freedom Sonata he explores the question of what true freedom is and can be.