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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on October 10, 2025
Noé Soulier. Photo by Elena Olivo
Concept and performance by Noé Soulier
Le Skyroom at L’Alliance New York
Crossing the Line Festival
With support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels
September 24, 2025
The pale wood floor, soft white walls, and dramatically-slanted face of dark windows in L’Alliance New York’s intimate Skyroom provide a sanctuary of calm simplicity on a damp, cool early autumn evening. These environs play host to the clarified curiosities of Noé Soulier, the French performer, choreographer, and director of CNDC Angers.
His Movement on movement, a 45-minute lecture-performance based on William Forsythe’s Improvisational Technologies, unfolds as an extended exercise in simultaneous mental and physical acuity. Forsythe’s structures manifest throughout in the folding geometries and energetic vectors of his body, though Soulier also nods to several others in his dance lineage. The modern and postmodern greats appear in tone and temper: Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer converse with Soulier’s training as a ballet dancer — and his degree in Philosophy from the Sorbonne puts in equal play.
Soulier’s boyish elegance belies a sharp, bustling mind, the workings of which he articulates with consummate precision through his body. He is rarely still, but when still, pointedly so, just as his voice is rarely silent, but when silent, decidedly so. His stamina and equanimity astonish — sweat collects slowly on his brow and darkens his simple gray t-shirt, though he shows little indication of fatigue or strain in his near-constant stream of movement and words. Despite this measured outpouring, the performance’s overall effect averts monotony through an intense focus that hones in on an idea while connecting to constellations of thought.
Possibilities and constraints activate Soulier’s accumulations and repetitions, with explorations and departures that allow the thread of his thinking to stretch and slacken. He seldom departs from a small portion of central space in the room, his body darkly reflected at a steep angle in the windows behind and above him. Yet what he restrains in terms of visible locomotion he makes up for in activation of the invisible as he fills the space around him with points, lines, vectors, planes, curves, and three-dimensional shapes to serve as guides, containers, or obstacles.
Meandering philosophies unfurl in his softly-accented English, giving voice to ways of thinking about movement and the body that are largely intuitive or inarticulable in a dancer's everyday life. The body becomes a tool, organized into “motor” and “mobile” modules; languages of reproducible form (such as the balletic arabesque), and actionable tasks (as in postmodern performance) bring into question the body as subject and object. It’s not all so serious — Soulier tosses in sly little jokes (albeit dancer jokes) to make sure he hasn’t lost us — and if his words become too much, his body’s purposeful, ever-shifting geometries serve as captioner and interpreter. By returning to motifs — the “point, point, line” gesture sequence, a sleek fifth position, tessellations of elbows and knees, an edge carved with forearm or toe — he offers multiple avenues to build recognition and understanding, doing and defining his movement and its goal at once as both “action” and “record.”
With Movement on movement, Soulier commands attention with an open hand, just as he moves and speaks with eyes open to the world: generous, perceptive, and unfailingly curious.
L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival continues through November 22, 2025.
