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.

An intellectual and subversive review, which handles satire and black humor in a grating and poetic atmosphere inspired by the Berlin cabaret of pre-war.
An authentic cabaret of today, the result of a collective work guided by Pierre Meunier, the show’s leader, from the proposals of the five musicians, the conductor, the singer and an aerial dancer.

When he wrote the cycle that was to change the course of twentieth-century music, Arnold Schönberg wanted the 21 melodramas based on Albert Giraud’s famous cycle to be “spoken and sung” in the language of the country where they were performed, in keeping with the very young tradition of Berlin cabaret. The poet’s verses were set to music by the composer in a very free German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben, stripped of their rhymes and the original metre. Thanks to his translation, which is as faithful to Schönberg’s prosody as it is to Hartleben’s version, Guillaume Bourgogne gives the French text the expressiveness and rhythm of the emphatic style of the cabarets and theaters of 1900.
Incorporated into a show with numbers, the cycle takes on its function of entertainment, where Pierre Meunier’s elucidations meet Michaux’s hallucinations, Satchie Noro’s aerial dance counterpoises Jessica Martin-Maresco’s punk voice, and Thierry de Mey and Guilhem Meier’s scores respond to the illustrious Viennese. Each musician of the Op.Cit ensemble, repainted for the occasion as a cabaret artist, lends himself with virtuosity to this poetic and absurd review.

Musical direction : Guillaume Bourgogne, Stage direction : Pierre Meunier, French adaptation : Guillaume Bourgogne

with : Pierre Meunier : actor, Satchie Noro : dancer, Jessica Martin-Maresco : voice, Sabine Tavenard : flute, Alexis Ciesla : clarinet, Claudine Simon : piano, Albane Genat : violin & viola, Noémi Boutin : cello

Lighting design : Hervé Frichet, Sound design : Frédéric Finand, Costumes : Emily Cauwet

Music : Pierrot Lunaire / Arnold Schönberg, La Chute / Guilhem Meier, Silence must be / Thierry de Mey, Densité 21,5 / Edgar Varese, Pisse / Guilhem Meier