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.

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 – 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

 

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.

 

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

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

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.