A successful electronic musician and singer in his home country of France, Awir Leon is also a contemporary dancer. Before the release of his 2016 album Giants, he worked with Emanuel Gat Dance, the company he used to perform with, to create a show that would be both an electronic music gig and a dance performance. The result, Sunny, sees Awir mixing live on-stage alongside the dancers.
Here, the French musician speaks to DRAFF about moving between dance and electronic music.

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Were you a dancer first or a musician first, or was it both at the same time?
I was a musician first - I started making music when I was a teenager. It was in my family, so when I was a kid I was always playing instruments. But when I turned 18 I started dancing and I found a job as a dancer in a contemporary company in Paris. So I moved there and I started working. And then, yeah, dance took me. I didn’t decide to go the dance way but it happened and kept happening so I went with it and enjoyed it, but I was always making music on the side. And then four years ago I started to feel I had something musically that I wanted to discover… more than the dancing. And so, I started pushing for it and it started happening.

When you started when you were younger, was it with a particular instrument or your voice or…?
I always liked singing and playing guitar, but when I started making music it was with my brother, who was already singing and playing guitar, so the role I was allowed to have was as the drummer. And then when I moved away from my family home to Paris, I was by myself in a tiny apartment with no instruments, and all I had was a small laptop so I started being interested in electronic instruments. Now I use Ableton and whatever I find. My album Giants is a collage of a lot of different things, a lot of it is recorded on my phone in the street, even some of the vocal parts are recorded on my phone and then I put them together with the rest, I sample myself with the rest. Even some instrument parts are recorded on my phone.

So when you first met Emanuel and started dancing, did you introduce him to your musician side, was it always present as you were working with him?
No, it started very gradually. I really started as a dancer because I was also shy with my music at the time, I was doing it but doing it at home. But then I started getting closer with Emanuel and I realised we had similar taste, and he listened to my music and he liked it. In the piece we made before Sunny, Plage Romantique, I was already playing guitar and singing on stage. Also, some of the score for that piece came from some of the guitar playing I recorded during the creation of it. So that was already an in-between stage. After that piece I told Emanuel, I really want to put all my time into music. And he said, ok then, for the next piece why don’t you come back as Awir.

So in Plage Romantique you were both playing guitar and dancing?
Yeah, he made me dance with the guitar, run around the stage with the guitar… I was afraid of killing the other dancers.

​Did you feel weird doing that?
Yeah … I felt kind of weird. That’s the good thing with Emanuel, he always makes you feel weird. He puts you in a place where you’re not so comfortable and then you to have deal with it – that’s what I like.

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What’s the relationship for you between movement and music?
It’s gonna sound a bit cliché, but it’s really the same thing. It’s play. It’s just play, whether with movement or with music. I feel like we’re all just playing and trying to find the small new thing that excites us and makes us want to keep doing it more and is gonna get the people excited too. When I slip out of this playful mood I try to bring myself back to it.

How was the process with Emanuel in the studio in making Sunny?
We agreed from the beginning that I wasn’t going to make a soundtrack for the piece, that was not the point. I’d done that with other companies and it was not what we wanted for Sunny. He really wanted me to come on stage and do a gig like I would do normally. And it was interesting at the time because my album Giants was already finished, but not out, and so I was working on the live show and adapting songs and then joining the company in rehearsals and we would try and fix the songs I had adapted to whatever sections of material they had made.

We would try matching the songs to the material, trying with one, then another, then another, and it was pretty obvious which songs worked with which section, and then we built the piece like this, with the obvious working combinations.

So all the music is from your album?
There are three tracks that are not, that are only for Sunny. So I improvised in the studio with these. The rest are from the album. But then of course, we adapted them … we reacted to each other in the studio. Nothing is dead. And it keeps reacting throughout the shows, we keep taking this song out and bringing a new song in, making the song longer. The cover of Sunny, the first track in the piece, is always improvised, it’s always kind of free and the two songs that come after that are really free.

What do you mean by free?
Well there’s a base, but there’s not a fixed structure that I do every time. It’s not written in this way. I have elements but then I bring them at different times. It’s not a full-on improvisation from scratch, I know where I’m going, but it adapts to the dancing.

How do you feel being on-stage with the dancers you used to dance with? Do you start moving?
Yeah, all the time… but it’s nice because I get to watch them, I never got to watch them before. Sometimes I wish the audience got to see Emanuel’s pieces from the stage.

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Do you feel you’re in the same flow as them, the same energy as them?
It depends on the show – sometimes very much and sometimes it feels like two things are happening in parallel. It really depends. That’s what shows me that the piece is alive. It works differently every time. It really depends on the audience too – sometimes I feel much more reaction from the audience and then I tend to go into gig mode, concert mode. I forget about the dancers and start looking at people in the audience, but it doesn’t happen often, mostly I’m connected to the dancers.

With your own gigs, do you have visuals?
No, not yet. That’s on purpose actually because I feel a lot of electronic artists put visuals in their gigs from the first tour and … I don’t know… sometimes I feel it’s just there to hide behind and I wanted to make sure that’s not what I’m doing. I wanted to make sure the show works as a bare proposition with just me on stage doing what I do and that’s it. And then we can build. Start from the core and build around it, I think it’s more interesting.

Do you think this structure you have with Sunny could be an interesting proposition for other electronic musicians?
Yeah definitely, it’s already happening. Clark from Warp, he has contemporary dancers with him on stage. Yeah, it’s happening a lot because I think it’s just logical. A lot of great acts just dance themselves. Like Prince, Michael Jackson … it’s completely organic. I think it would be cool, I think it’s nice if there’s a medium for contemporary dance to reach another audience. Theatres are good but it narrows who you can reach.
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Of course, you’ve performed Sunny at dance festivals but have you performed it to a music audience?
No, but I would love to – I think it would work perfectly in a music festival. I think the more audiences you reach the better. What I said about theatres is also true about music festivals – it’s a certain type of audience who comes to the venues. I think, with any form, it’s important to bring people in. I think it’s important not to change what you do just to go and get the people – that’s a completely different process – but it’s important to bring people in. It’s important, whatever you do, to keep creating bridges.

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Sunny by Emanuel Gat in collaboration with Awir Leon will be on at the Abbey Theatre on the 22nd - 23rd May as part of the Dublin Dance Festival. 

Images: 1 + 2 Plage Romantique, Emanuel Gat. 3 + 4 Sunny, Emanuel Gat.

Posted: 15 May 2017.