Steps for Beasts that Never Were

Steps for Beasts that Never Were is inspired by Philip K. Dick’s short story The Preserving Machine (1953), in which an inventor builds a machine that transforms musical scores into wild animals in order to preserve them from a potential flood. This bizarre experiment turns into a fiasco, in an ecosystem where the terrifying Wagner animal, the Schubert lamb, the Mozart and Stravinsky birds, the Bach fly, and other creatures encounter each other.
This piece, written for the Monte-Carlo ballets and choreographer Jeroen Verbruggen, attempts to represent, within a haunting ostinato, the metamorphosis of a few brief quotations from the aforementioned composers into uncontrollable musical organisms, pure sound energy.