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
