Bagatelle For Yoshi

2020 · São Paulo Dance Company

Bagatelle for Yoshi was created during the first COVID-19 lockdown, in a one-room apartment in Wiesbaden, Germany. The solo was performed by Yoshi Suzuki and filmed to be presented as part of a television special broadcast by TV Cultura, a Brazilian television channel, on 19 December 2020.

Set to one of Beethoven’s Bagatelles, the work is built from pathways, lines and recurring structures. Its A–B–A musical form becomes a framework for movement that continuously repeats, shifts and reconfigures itself, playing with the viewer’s expectations while maintaining a sense of lightness and pleasure.

The work proposes something deliberately simple: the joy of dancing. Rather than using dance to represent an idea or narrative, it treats dancing itself as the subject — as an activity valuable for the pleasure of doing it, watching it and giving oneself over to its unfolding.

The bagatelle — a small, seemingly insignificant musical form — becomes a proposition for dance itself: that something apparently simple can contain complexity, surprise and beauty. In this sense, the work approaches dance as an ideal in itself, independent of spectacle, narrative or justification.