Alain Fleischer, Arnaud Petit
I.D. / Opéra technologique - Performance - 2015
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 17
Performance
I.D. is an opera in which technology, revisiting the old tradition of illusion, is used to summon up dream and memory. To this end, a virtual singing figure was created by a process of technological development patiently coordinated by Le Fresnoy. Endowed with a body (thanks to CIRMMT, NUMEDIART and Inria) and a singing voice (thanks to Ircam), this figure comes across first of all as an image, the double of a real singer (Eléonore Lemaire). Surprised by the creation of its reflection, which seems to be alive, our figure starts on an exploration (at once mental, questioning, mnemonic) that may lead her to recognise the nature of this double, which is intimately bound up with her personal history. Alain Fleischer’s narrative, which interrogates both language and memory, undergoes a musical development which bends genres, just like the uncertainty over the identity of the technological character. Overlooking the representation, a mime (Jean Asselin) seems to be the master of ceremonies of this strange event. His gestures control an attentive apparatus, animate the figure, possibly a figment of the singer’s mind. The show is a like a dream which brings to the fore several hidden places of a human and perhaps historical consciousness. Below, the musicians of the “century” orchestra trace the continuity of this narrative which is also musical.
Alain Fleischer
Arnaud Petit
Composer Arnaud Petit has taken an interest in and worked with the image in its many different forms. Choosing to work with silent films at IRCAM in the late 1980's, he used music and sound to develop the theatrical power of images. In his opera, La Place de la république, premiered at the Centre Pompidou in the early 1990s, he himself made a central cinematic part of the opera. He has also been interested in the sound and music dimension of exhibitions (especially «Les immatériaux» with Jean-François Lyotard). Since then, orchestral and electronic music has played an important part in his work. He is also interested in the link between popular music and written music and in 2013 created the Chaos Orchestra with Daniel Yvinec in order to explore it. He is currently working on an adaptation of a text by Nicolas Bouvier, Halla San, for soprano, actor and percussion ensemble, which will be premiered in January 2016 at the Théâtre de la Ville/Théâtre des Abbesses, by the Percussions Claviers de Lyon. He has won several awards in Europe and the United States (Lavoisier Laureate, Villa Medici, McDowell Fellow, International Theatre Institute, etc.).
Production
Partners
Acknowledgments
François Xavier Roth, Emrique Therain, Christophe Rauck, Nathalie Pousset, Anne-Marie Peigné, François Revol, Jacky Lautem, Laurent Delplanque, Bertrand Scalabre, Eric Prigent, Stéphanie Robin, Laurent Grisoni, Andrew Gerszo, Franck adlener, Marcelo Wanderley, Axel Roebel, Luc Ardaillon, Hussein Kamak, Etienne Landon
