Synopsis

Michaux is a poet who makes music through poetry. For him, words are the elements of a musical composition. He draws his music. Through a ritual monodrama, Michaux, a character with three facets, enters into dialogue with himself under the influence of hallucinogens, inviting the audience to immerse themselves in his poetic world, at once musical and pictorial.

Note

This project grew out of the encounter between composer Alireza Farhang and Trio KDM, and their shared desire to create a staged musical work inspired by Henri Michaux’s writings and drawings. For this project, Alireza Farhang continues his research into musical composition through sonic and physical gesture, exploring the possibilities offered by new technologies. An accordionist and two percussionists, equipped with gesture sensors and playing both physical and virtual instruments, enter into dialogue and interact with sounds and images generated by the computer.

“Having never, as a child, taken to playing with the sand on beaches, I found myself, long past the usual age, wanting to play, and now to play with sounds.”

Chuchotements burlesques brings together sound, light, image, speech, and sonic and physical gesture around music. Its creative process unfolds organically, giving the work a formal flexibility that allows it to adapt to a variety of stage settings. Research into the graphic representation of sound and music has led to the development of a hybrid graphic notation, enabling artists from different disciplines to engage intuitively with the musical score.

The extensive possibilities offered by new technologies give the piece a scope that reaches beyond the concert format. In the composition of Chuchotements burlesques, musical intentions are rooted in extramusical forms of expression, in which physical and visual gesture plays an important role. Inspired by the poems and drawings of Henri Michaux and Bijan Elāhi, this transdisciplinary project seeks to blur the boundaries between music, literature, painting, theatre, and choreography. The work can be presented in several versions, each giving prominence to a different art form.

ResMusica

Composer Alireza Farhang’s Chuchotements burlesques, conceived for an actor, accordion, two percussionists, and live electronics, is a transdisciplinary project — music theatre, he tells us — presented this evening in a new, fifty-minute version, twenty-five minutes longer than the original project completed before lockdown. Inspired by the writings and drawings of Henri Michaux and Bijan Elāhi, the work brings spoken and sung voices, gestures seen and heard, light, and sound into interaction within the performance space. The three musicians’ dark costumes — designed by the composer himself! — are accented with fluorescent yellow strips to make their gestures more visible, while the black gloves with tentacle-like fingers worn by actor and stage director Bruno Boulzaguer recall percussion accessories.

A music of intimacy and sensibility. The composer seeks to evoke and suggest poetic states between sound and meaning, reality and virtuality, within the ambiguity made possible by new technologies. Indeed, the hands of the two percussionists from Antwerp’s HERMESensemble, as well as the actor’s body, are fitted with sensors. These enable interaction between gesture and sound — and even light — for the musicians, and between the voice and its live processing for the actor. Thus, without relinquishing the meaning of Michaux’s text, Farhang brings it into the realm of sound. Anthony Millet’s accordion undergoes no processing. Its role is central: a kind of interface between the percussion setups and the electronic sound source, controlled this evening by Patrick Delges. Closely attentive to the actor’s words and their inflections, which he echoes in sound, Anthony Millet also contributes vocally, as do his fellow percussionists. One of the two percussionists is featured at the front of the stage, triggering sounds on virtual instruments solely through gestures made at different points in space.

On the screen at the back of the stage, the composition’s graphic score scrolls past. A first draft, the composer explains, it reveals the direction of movement and the organic nature of the components within a trajectory whose flow of events and dramaturgy he carefully shapes. One example is the striking flourish of the spinning cymbal at the end of a long percussion solo. It releases resonance and imposes a silence into which the actor’s voice returns in one of the finest sequences (“Why must I compose?”). With finesse and sophistication, and with the aid of electronics, this sequence brings together the temporalities of text and music in a remarkably successful theatrical flow.

Let us applaud the commitment and responsiveness of a closely coordinated team, both on stage and at the console — the composer runs the patch! — in bringing this demanding project to fruition. It is the second piece in a series entitled L’espace du dedans, whose mysteries Alireza Farhang invites us to explore.

Read the original review on ResMusica