home work

Home Work in Bregenzer Festspiele

In Bregenz, was on 29th and 31st of july the premiere of a new show including video, live music and text: HOME WORK.It is actually based on material composed for Ensemble Recherche in 2008 for the Witten festival.

But here it's a complete rewriting, and adjunction of many elements : first my videos, animation movies i realized at home, and a new space concept : the audience turns around the stage, and can choose their position.

And the performers were not Ensemble Recherche, but Ictus plus guests (performer Dani Ploeger and saxophone player Mathieu Metzger).

I did the video thinking of a double side projection : the stage is divided in three, so that each sub scene has a half of a screen in common with the two other ones.
What makes it interesting is that there is a transparency between the opposite sides of the screens.
These screens, by the way, are large pieces of fabrik that i painted myself :

And large is large : about 7 meters on 7 meters.

But it's nice to have the combination of the painting and the projection.
This is for instance this same screen (above) with projection on it :

By changing the projection, i obtain a variety of colours and textures of very interesting types.

For the subject, the nigh-on religious rituals of a "common-or-garden" neurosis are presented in short mechanical routines, on a triple stage without interface. Well, almost without interface, they had a click track (metronome).

The whole caboodle flanked by three different films and three autonomous musical pairings.

The spectators are invited to stroll around in the midst of this curious spectacular machine, which, in the end, merges into a hyper-polyphonic musical adventure.

Home Work is less narrative in the autobiographic sense than other projects of the cycle Von d'r Wiige bis zum Gr., the purpose is to make a external expression of usually intimate and inconscious behaviors or thoughts.

It focuses drifted sexual behaviours, turned into rituals. This is strongly subjective and incomplete, and should not be interpreted as a case study, or as psychoanalysis demonstration, but more as a serious farce, so to speak.

Home Work in Bregenzer Festspiele

This is the plot : At home, three men (A in the garage, B in the kitchen and C in the living) are fixing the last details for an upcoming event : a machine test for A, a diner for B, a date for C. What seemed to be a simple home work takes unexpected directions.

The things so fervently requested happen but go beyond expectation, and provoke as much satisfactions as catastrophes, including cannibalism, sado-masochism and self-destruction.

Like i usually do, i ask the musicians to participate vocally, and gestually. The enlargement of roles is to be linked with what i previously said about the needs of a complete involvment, beyond categories.

It can be strange to do so much : music, video, texts, setting... but it gives a serious plus : a consistency from within. And also no endless and fruitless discussions.

Much more home work, though.