creation 2023
LANDSCAPES
DES ENFERS
immersive musical exploration
In the end, it's all just a game or a dream.
And that in games (and dreams) everything ends with the alarm clock or the final gong?
Gérard Hourbette
Following in Gérard Hourbette's artistic footsteps, we embarked almost 3 years ago on the production of a new "object", a "show" that we wanted to be free of all convention.
The challenge was to put the music at the center, even if it was surrounded by dance, video and lighting: to let the music be heard in an unrestricted scenic form, in complete freedom, without embellishment or wrapping. Lively, vibrant, violent electronic music with remnants of the vanished past, factory or concrete sounds, music by Gérard Hourbette, Kasper T. Toeplitz and heart-rending deep noise, like an echo of our times and our society.
The music is performed live by Kasper T. Toeplitz at the front of the stage (in keeping with the logic of visual and sound non-interference). Several loudspeakers, the pillars of this new scenographic universe, are positioned in this digital and carnal space. Surrounding them is a video by Dominik Barbier, diffused at the back of the stage, mixing icons of a certain hell with images of musicians and dancers.
The only powerful human presence on stage is that of Myriam Gourfink, both choreographer and performer, with her breath, her warmth, her infernal, enclosing slowness. Another physical presence is Annie Leuridan's lighting, which sculpts Myriam Gourfink's body and shapes the space, adding a third dimension and blurring the lines between body and ghost, real and digital, dead and alive. In subtly lit half-light, Myriam Gourfink dialogues with two partners trapped in the film, a horn-playing musician, Elena Kakaliagou, and a dancer, Azusa Takeuchi.
This show will dare to be violent, at times, poetic and human... No doubt everyone will find an echo of their own existence in the very short time of one hour of life...
Monique Hourbette-Vialadieu
Art Zoyd Studios, September 2022
Show premiered February 3, 2023 at Phénix - Scène Nationale de Valenciennes
Available on tour - Contact production / diffusion
Monique Hourbette-Vialadieu
artzoyd@wanadoo.fr
+ 33 (0)6 10 80 68 60
When I think of the video and music project "Paysage des Enfers" (Landscape of the Underworld), (...) it's the term transmutation that comes to mind, not re-dressing an existing project in perhaps more contemporary colors, but breathing new life into it, without denying its past.
Whereas the original version was only music (on record), but already aimed at a stage form, it was an electronic presentation - in partnership with video and dance - that was decided for this project.
Pre-existing music is not so much arranged as superimposed, amalgamated with new musical materials, some of purely synthetic origin, others instrumental (bass, percussion, brass), but instruments as if gorged with electronics, supersaturated with declensions of themselves, for a music that, more than "reconstruction", is a parallel advance of two (sound) worlds fused into one.
The final objective is twofold or has a dual purpose: on the one hand, a video film that can be viewed and listened to repeatedly, in private, but also its monumental enclosure, on a large screen and with a powerful (and imposing) sound system, an integral part of the project.
Kasper T. Toeplitz