Música para Mysterious Heart
Diogo Alvim
“Mysterious Heart” is a dance piece by choreographer Tânia Carvalho, created for Tanzmainz at the Staatstheater Mainz in 2023–24. The music composed for this project was conceived from the outset with a certain autonomy from the choreography. The initial idea, taken from a practice already familiar in Tânia’s choreographic work, involved exploring and characterising different emotions or states of mind — a kind of sonic catalogue of affects that would later support the choreographic composition. With this in mind, I proposed working with the drawings of Charles Le Brun, published in his treatise “Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions” (1698). These drawings, which examine the particularities of facial expressions associated with different human emotions, stem from Descartes’s “Les Passions de l’Âme” (1649) and became a kind of visual grammar for many later creations. At the same time, in much of her work — both in drawing and in choreography — Tânia has developed her own vocabulary of facial expressions, which created an immediate affinity with Le Brun’s universe. The first step was to select a group of emotions and their corresponding drawings, and to record vocal improvisations by Tânia exploring each affect. The only exception was “Envy”, which does not appear in Le Brun’s catalogue; for this we used the figure “de la jalousie naist l’aversion”. With no stimulus other than the “passion” and its drawing, the recordings were made without any instrumental accompaniment or sonic support. (Label info)