Un pays supplémentaire (an additional country)

Play for young audiences and all ages, sound and visual creation

premiered in 2025
approx. 40 minutes

Claudine Simon : concept, performance
AnneSOphie Berard assisted by Maéva Prigent : visual artist
Etienne Demoulin : sound engineer, rim

A title, an approach…

Un pays supplémentaire (an additionnal country) is a reference to a phrase coined by film critic Serge Daney.

This expression sounds like a message to arrouse children’s curiosity.

Practising music adds a whole new world to ones life, a realm of emotions and perceptions. It’s also a way of living, seeing, listening and feeling that you can make your own. It’s a very special world that we can make our own.

It’s a bit like when you’re faced with translating a foreign language. When you go looking for formulas and expressions, you very often find an astonishing way of saying things that is specific to that language. These formulas, these unexpected combinations of words for our own mode of expression, our own language, stimulate the imagination. Foreign languages have fascinating ways of making us see and feel differently what we actually say in our own language.They can bring up up cultural, visual and oral references, uncovering new ways of thinking and seeing, a whole baggage of curious equivalents and surprising false friends – in short, another world…

This project aims to lead the children to discover something special, an unusual and more experimental kind of music. This discovery, this encounter, will be brought about by the stratagem of a model train that you can follow with your eyes. It acts on sound (what sound?) and produces cast shadows.

Along the way, the amusing and amazing events, put the children in the right receptive mood. Their field of attention and desire grows, their perception opens up, and they are offered a new way of listening, as an invitation rather than a prescription.

An installation

An unusual installation appeared : a miniature electric train on a circuit on the floor, surrounding the piano.

The intricate parts of the piano (keys, hammers, small mechanisms, springs) or and the preparations (clothes pegs, balls, brushes, etc.) are placed on either side.

The train then sets off.

An LED light fixed to the front sweeps across the space, creating a shadow effect on the walls of the room, while a shotgun microphone fixed to the top amplifies the sounds of the journey.

The objects scattered on the floor take on a completely different form and appearance. The closer they are to the spotlight, the more imposing their shadows become. Little by little, these figures take on the shape of an urban landscape, the projected black touches becoming gigantic buildings that stand out against the walls.

Our position as spectators is turned upside down. This miniature train and the phantasmagoria associated with its movement transform us into travellers on an unexpected journey. We’re transported into an astonishing, improbable universe, creating an immediate sense of interaction with the performance.

download file / an additionnal country

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rudy decelière

Anatomia

Concept, creation, performance : Claudine Simon ; Sound  : Laurent Sassi ;  Scenography : Rudy Decelière ; outside view : Pau Simon ; Piano luthery : Thomas Garcin ; Stage and general management : Théo Vacheron

Creation at Musica Festival – 28-29 September 2023 – Strasbourg

Anatomia is a piano recital and an exhibition. Franz Liszt’s Funérailles, a virtuoso romantic piece composed in memory of three friends who died during the Hungarian revolution of 1848, is performed. Then the world-instrument opens up, as if to give us a better view of the music through it. In the darkness of a concert hall that has become an anatomical theatre, we witness a surreal scene. The piano is dissected, deconstructed, dismembered. Still resonating, its organs suspended in space seem endowed with life. In the manner of science fiction, we have shrunk to penetrate the labyrinths of the instrument, while our listening has widened and melted into the details of the sound painting.

CREATION in 2023 at the Musica festival in Strasbourg

Dates in 2025: April 2-3 at Maison de la Musique, Nanterre; May 7 at ZEF Scène Nationale, Marseille, with GMEM’s Propagations festival.

Dates in 2024: Théâtre de Vanves; Opéra de Dijon Ici l’onde-CNCM; Festival Détours de babels, Hexagone Scène Nationale de Meylan; Opéra underground (Lyon); Opéra de Reims – Césaré-CNCM; Espace Malraux Scène Nationale Chambéry Savoie

AURIS ⌊ sound and stage productions ⌉

Prize-winning project of “Mondes Nouveaux” DGCA – Ministry of Culture; of the Beaumarchais-SACD foundation, la Maison de la Musique Contemporaine

Co-production : Espace Malraux Scène Nationale Chambéry ; ici l’onde Dijon, Théâtre de Vanves – DRAC Auvergne Rhône-Alpes ; Support and residency: GMEM-CNCM Marseille, Why Note ici l’onde, Espace Malraux Scène Nationale Chambéry, Scène Nationale d’Orléans, Opéra underground, Pianos Baruth


 

Photos © Rudy Decelière

 

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Fresques

We no longer see the image of the landscape, we see the landscape of the image – Jacques Perconte ©

Claudine Simon (prepared piano) and Christian Sebille (electronics) both have a relationship with musical writing, even if their training and career paths have been dissimilar.
Claudine Simon, diverting the instrument she has always played, questions her intimate relationship with the piano. Christian Sebille, on the other hand, seeks to rediscover the pleasure of immediate instrumental play and develops controlled electronic lutherie.

The exploration of timbres within the piano constitutes the sound material of the transformations operated by the electronics. The improvisation is built through the dialogue between the two musicians thanks to the coming and going of sonorities and musical proposals.

Then, reminiscences and evanescent ghosts appear between the materials and the sound features of three preludes by Claude Debussy. These quotations constitute the axes of perspective of the walk. The landscape changes and metamorphoses between the thickness of the sounds, the memories that form our memory and the new discovery of a never seen panorama. We await the next angle and the surprise of another perspective.

 

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Duo Simon | Trelcat

Claudine SIMON : prepared and hybrid piano

Vivien TRELCAT : electonical lutherie

In the first half of the 20th century, the composers Henry Cowell and John Cage considerably extended the field of possibilities of the piano. The first went inside the instrument to manipulate the strings directly. The second inserted various objects between the strings to transform it into a sort of percussion orchestra guided by the hazards of matter and movement.

This duo is part of this filiation, between sound engineering and artistic exploration. In complicity with Vivien Trelcat, Claudine Simon goes in search of the secrets hidden by her instrument by adding appendages, by touching it with electromechanical devices as well as with incongruous objects.

Much more than a high-tech performance, this duo of improvisers allows a dialogue with the instrument, its lutherie, its history, revealing the poetic relationship between the organic and mechanical bodies.

Delegated production : GMEM-CNCM Marseille, development and design Machines : Collectif Sonopopée, with the support of Saintex numérique Reims, Césaré-CNCM Reims

–>> Extracts and interview

The duo SIMON | TRELCAT is a duo of improvisers who assert a will to question the piano playing, the lutherie, its coupling with technology and the digital. The main axis of this collaboration is constituted around the hybridization of the piano realized by an electromechanical device which comes to transform the traditional lutherie and to disturb its use. The modelling of the instrument’s sound capacities opens up a new playing space.

The electroacoustic augmentation of the instrument, via a work of timbre by digital treatment allows to revisit the know-how, a knowledge to hear, in the instantaneousness of the improvisation. A new musical and gestural grammar takes shape.

This device was created in 2020-21 by the Sonopopée collective thanks to a commission from the GMEM-CNCM of Marseille.

 

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Pianomachine

Performative, visual and sound experience
Creation on March 10th 2021, Scène Nationale d’Orléans

Claudine Simon : conception, performing pianist – Vivien Trelcat : computer lutherie, machine performer – Pauline Simon : choreographic vision – Franck Lemonde : texts – Jacques-Benoit Dardant : lights, scenography, general management – Collectif Sonopopée (Vivien Trelcat, Max Lance, Nicolas Canot) development and design of the machines – Insa de Lyon students : prototypes of the machines

I have always considered the piano like a body, an organism. I have always wanted to know what was happening inside, what was this machinery, this frightful power rumbling and rolling under its wooden chest. Remembering the words of my professors who taught me how to tame it (we pianists have been, for that matter, educated like machines to look for the most precise movement every time) I do sense a significant artistic stake.
For a long time, I have been wanting to create a show, which would hold at its core this machine, this mass, its intensity and its mechanisms. In the meantime, I would like to investigate this particular hand-to-hand relation it imposes on the human machinery in order to achieve sound purposes.

Pianomachine proceeds from an organological study that I have pursued with engineering students from the INSA in Lyon. This study resulted in the creation of a prototypical Piano in which automated units (percussive tools, resonators, bouncy masses) are added to the piano organism and act on its strings and structure. The instrument is conceived as an extension of the interpreter’s active power. The added machines provoke chain reactions, in or out of sync, by the piano player.

A hand-to-hand relation is by nature one of struggle as much as one of desire, sensuality and pleasure, the lovers’ union. This relation is first and foremost the one that has been bonding man to machine for centuries. It involves the body as much as the brain cells or rather what one could designate as the body/brain. It is in fact a matter of resonance between those two bodies: the human and the instrument, to evoke their inner parts and their outer parts, what is shown to the eye, what is given to hear and what is not. A dialogue is built up between the two “subjects” through a performative mode of sound, verbal and gestural exchanges, a kind of visual narrative.

Delegated production: GMEM-CNCM Marseille https://gmem.org/production/pianomachine/

co-production La muse en circuit CNCM-Alforville, La Fondation Royaumont, Financed by the Région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the DRAC Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Supported by: Saintex culture numérique Reims, Insa de Lyon, Césaré CNCM-Reims, Malraux Scène Nationale Chambéry Savoie

 

pianomachine CCAM Vandoeuvre © G. Savin

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claudine simon, comment s'en sortir sans sortir

Comment s’en sortir sans sortir

direction and scenography : Frédérique Aït-Touati – Musical creation and play : Elise Dabrowski voice, double bass & Claudine Simon prepared piano, voice – Acousmatic music : Eric Broitmann – Lights and general management : Emmanuel Sauldubois – Choreographic support : Pauline Simon – Costumes : Céline Pigeot – Assistant director : Nina Ayachi – Assistant scenography : Margaux Folléa – Assistant lights : Victor Inisan
on texts by Ghérasim Luca

A tale of initiation and seduction, Comment s’en sortir sans sortir? is a celebration of the magical powers of music. Elise Dabrowski and Claudine Simon are only two on stage and yet it is an opera for voice, double bass, piano and electronic music that they compose and perform.

Heirs to the long tradition of fairies and magicians, from Purcell to Wagner, from Melusine to Starhawk, they are contemporary witches who take us into a dreamlike universe where pianos move and bows fly; a world where the hypnotic language of Gherasim Luca is spoken and where plants react to music. In this opera that questions our relationship with other living beings, we glimpse the mystery of matter through the spell of music and voice.

Production: Trepak, Zone Critique Co-production: Théâtre de Vanves, Hexagone Scène Nationale Arts Sciences Support: DRAC Ile-de-France, Mairie de Paris, ARCADI Île de France, CNV, Cité de la Voix de Vézelay, PSL, IRIS OCAVE Diffusion : Full Rhizome

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Critical phase

by Samuel Sighicelli on a libretto by Pierre Kuentz

with : Noémi Boutin, cello & voice; Claudine Simon, prepared piano & voice; Jacques Benoît Dardant, lights, Sabine Novel, movement

The cellist Noémi Boutin and the pianist Claudine Simon extend their instrumental playing to the spoken voice and to the gestures induced by a very physical score. Gestures, words and sounds – meeting electronics – unite to express a critical state, where everything is questioned, where desires and fears collide, where the human being, behind the instrument, will crack. The musicians move us by the pathetic heroism with which they cross this absurd critical phase. After the slogans of self-persuasion and the lists of desires comes the time of a more personal and interior speech. The intimacy found, the sound and the time widen, here is that the ear opens, letting resurface the childhood which had remained lurking in the shade…

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Chant d’hiver

Conception, direction by Samuel Sighicelli – Text, Tanguy Viel.

An alchemy between Schubert’s Winterreise (“Winter Journey”) and the glacial adventure of a researcher in Antarctica.

Winter Song is a musical and scenic plunge into the Antarctic polar night, carried by the story freely inspired by a scientific mission of glaciologist Claude Lorius in 1984. During this mission, ice coring and chemical analysis revealed the first evidence of the influence of human activity on climate change.
The experience of the South Pole, described by Tanguy Viel and set to music and stage by Samuel Sighicelli, gradually gives way to lieder borrowed from Schubert’s “Winter Journey”. The romantic vision of the world as a “great soul” and the current scientific apprehension of the Earth can meet in one place, perhaps that place is at the very end of the world, in the night and the cold, where the icy ground delivers its ancestral secrets. A man – both the glaciologist on a mission and Schubert’s traveler – struggles in the cold: the music created here is alternately the landscape in which he evolves and the expression of what he experiences physically and internally.

The score is carried by two musicians and an actor, in a sound and visual device, where the interactions between text, light, sound and video draw a sensory polyphony. The borrowings from Schubert find a singular place, at the edge of the music, as if coming to us from far away in the storm…

Conception, direction Samuel Sighicelli
Music Samuel Sighicelli (with the complicity of Elise Dabrowsky and Claudine Simon), Franz Schubert (Lieder borrowed from the Winterreise cycle of Franz Schubert (text by W. Muller) and Mondnacht, lied by Robert Schumann (text by J.B. Von Eichendorff)

Original text Tanguy Viel, video Fabien Zocco, Set design Élodie Monet, Movement direction Marian Del Valle, Lights Nicolas Villenave / Sound, musical computing MAx Bruckert, Stage management Julien Duprat : With Elise Dabrowski mezzo soprano, double bass / Claudine Simon, piano / Dominique Tack, actor

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SOLI.DES

Choreography: Sébastien Laurent – Original music: Claudine Simon and Eric Broitmann – Performance: Claudine Simon and Sébastien Laurent – Electroacoustic music: Eric Broitmann – Assistant to the choreography and dramaturgy: Pauline Simon – Lighting: Xavier Libois – Set design: Frédéric Hocké and Violaine Decazenove – Production: Compagnie Moi Peau

SOLI.DES: two solos that affirm their plural, that of the dancer with the stage, that of the musician with her instrument, as the challenge of each of these two to experience the multiple deployments of an incarnation. Two engaged bodies. The piano, this obscure object of desire. Beyond the notes, the piano as a partner in its own right. Instrument decomposed, deconstructed, musical strings, like a landscape from which whole cities emerge. The piano no longer accompanies the dancer, it pushes him, constrains him even in his body.
The music redefines the space, makes new forms emerge. To produce a music of notes, gestures and breathlessness.
Soli.des ? A trio rather than a duo, therefore, an exciting exploration beyond the relationship between dance and music.

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Der Riss

Elise Dabrowski : vocals, double bass & Claudine Simon : prepared piano.

“RISS is the name of this duo. RISS as in fault or crack: the fault that lets the air in and circulates and allows communication between many musical worlds. The two musicians do not want to settle on one approach to music and only one. What they cultivate above all are the bridges, the crossed paths. “Anne Montaron”

This duo is made up of two classically trained musicians who are well versed in the art of improvisation. They are stretched in the same desire of subversion. For each of them, it is now years of sifting the writing and the musical forms to reverse the discursive and structural logic.

Here, using excerpts from well-known works by Schubert, Berg… works that have nourished and formed them, the two musicians decide to place themselves in the position of strangers.

To experiment instead of interpreting, that is the new posture. It is a question of creating, of deconstructing these pieces, of opening up to new possibilities that will bring new sensations, other emotions.

These chosen extracts will be manipulated, distorted, shifted by the means of improvisation and a resolutely contemporary writing (prepared instruments). This approach gives rise to the emergence of a second level of language. A language based on experimentation and which is created in reaction to the previous know-how.

In the confrontation of these musical languages, a poetic, verbal, spoken or musicalized language, that of Gherasim Luca, will be mixed. This Romanian poet proposes, moreover, with his work a similar route. Everything happens as if the poetry of Luca struggles at all ends of “song” against a language by too “common”. To split the words or to make stutter the language. To work at the limits of the saying, in its impossibilities, in direction of the childhood of a language, by deconstructing the commonplaces, stereotypes and clichés of the language with an ear of foreigner, because the foreigner hears differently, and by there to formulate new syntaxes, to open with new possible.

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