Arc, a choreographed poem – Paul Savoie, Melanie Mesager, Catherine Parayre

“Arc” by award-winning author Paul Savoie is a poem which captures the pensive impressions of a moment and is suffused with a quiet musicality. Savoie’s passion for and practice of music inform this long melancholy song. Mélanie Mesager, a French dancer and scholar in contemporary dance, selected a few passages (in bold in Savoie’s text) and, for these, invented a choreography to accompany the poem. Mesager’s choreographic marks do not belong to existing systems of choreographic notation; they are a distinct creation that preserves her personal reaction to an intimate text. Her notes, translated by Nicholas Hauck, provide insight into her approach. A dancer responds to a poem, translates it into embodied movement, in a language as secret as the poet’s.