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

premiered in 2025
approx. 40 minutes

Claudine Simon : concept, performance
Fred Hocké : set design, performance
Etienne Demoulin : sound engineer

An open piano is placed on the floor on small legs.

You can see its : strings, pegs, small hammers and gold-coloured metal frame.
You can hear it : melodies, percussive sounds, strange sounds
You can visit it : a little train will take you to inaccessible places
You can scatter it around : a few pieces of key on the floor, a few accessories
You can transform your vision : it changes scale
scale, it becomes immense, it becomes a city, an entire world

This piece is a sonic and visual exploration in search of the secrets hidden inside a piano. We can appreciate its melodic qualities or its power when it manifests itself like a percussion orchestra. All this happens by chance through movement and encounters with the material.
It’s a sort of celebration of beauty, the beauty of things, the beauty of sound, the beauty of the fleeting and the ephemeral…

A title, an approach…

Un pays supplémentaire is a reference to a phrase coined by film critic Serge Daney.

This expression sounds like a message, a curiosity for children.

To have music in your life is to have an additional world, a whole realm of emotions and perceptions. It’s also a way of living, seeing, listening and feeling that you can make your own and that creates a world. It’s a world that is both very special and exceptional, and one that becomes familiar to us.

If I can draw a parallel, 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 a fascinating way of making us see and feel what we say in our own language a little differently, strangely. It brings up cultural, visual and aural references, discovering new ways of thinking and seeing, a whole baggage of curious equivalents and surprising false friendships – in short, another world…

This project will lead the children to discover something very special, an unusual kind of music, something a little experimental. This discovery, this encounter, will be brought about by a stratagem! It’s a little train that you can follow with your eyes. It acts on sound and produces cast shadows.

Along the way, the child’s interest in the events along the way, both amused and amazed, puts him or her in the right receptive mood. Their field of attention and desire grows, their perceptive field 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.

Objects belonging to the piano (keys, hammers, small mechanisms, springs) or to 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 micro-canon fixed to the top amplifies the sounds of the journey.

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.

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

Objects belonging to the piano (keys, hammers, small mechanisms, springs) or to 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 micro-canon fixed to the top amplifies the sounds of the journey.

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.

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.

 

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

 

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…

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.