At the initiative of the Orchestre de Paris, Cortèges is a collaborative project between Sasha J. Blondeau (composition), François Chaignaud (choreography, vocal performance) and Hélène Giannecchini (literature) for the creation of a hybrid piece for singer-dancer, large orchestra and electronics.
“The tension between their identities – in term of emancipation and creation but also of violence – and the places in which they practice their arts is at the heart of their discussions. How can we invent sharp, singular artistic languages without forcing them out of the world ?
How can we let the singularities (often hidden or fantasized) of our lives emerge in our arts without them becoming the subject ? Behind the metaphor of Wading through rivers, there is the politic power of the crowd and the question of the individual facing the multitude.
There would be the shock of the start, a moment of seizure as one plunges into a bath of ice water. This blow takes up all the space so that then everything tightens instantly and that the spoken word arrives. The story of this show is quite simple : a person leaves his house and joins a crowd that seems to be forming and whose origin and demands are unknown. The public is driven into her stream of counsciousness. She tells what crosses her in a monologue punctuated by addresses. It is a gradual descent into song. A song that gradually becomes part of the crowd. A voice that is constantly reconfigured and accompanied by instrumental and electronic music that surrounds it, relaunches it, increases it and carries it until it shakes sufficiently for the dance to happen. The pulsations, the trajectories and the polyphonies take place and come to mix the text, the dance and the music. This show is an opportunity to put into play, in the grammar, the power of metamorphosis of identity: the genres vary, the chords make the text move to create a living matter. This hybrid form mixing voice, dance, a large orchestra and an electronic part is a way to go beyond the hierarchies fixed by the classical orchestra, and to exceed the modes of representation of the concert halls dedicated to the great repertoire. The orchestra is partly spatialized in the middle of the audience. The stage then becomes a zone that will be gradually won by the dance. The electronic part is then a large interlacing between the figure of the voice, the majority of the orchestra on stage and the whole of the groups present in the middle of the public.”
Sasha J. Blondeau, Hélène Giannecchini & François Chaignaud