creation : 28.05.2015 at Théâtre de Hautepierre, Strasbourg (France)
duration : 15′
musicians: 6 percussionists
commission : Percussions de Strasbourg
« For this piece I imagined a large shadow theater performed around a central percussionist. Each percussionist plays a specific percussion family (for the center metal, wood or leather for five percussionists). Then are created, through the polyphony, synchronizations of more or less independent temporal layers, or by the more conventional liners, a drama in which each character is hiding behind another or comes to the « front » to make his speech more directly.
They are playing on the idea of resonance and on life that the latter can reveal from a simple attack, a « coup de theatre » so to speak! The shadows that act in the central percussionist’s resonances form a counterpoint that sometimes take ascendancy over him. The work of the same name created by artist Christian Boltanski has been a strong inspiration, a poetic perspective. The « stories » are performed in many ways while giving an impression of great cohesion.
More than a theater, a constellation of shadows playing, with respect to each other, a parable about what can be polyphony. «
Julia Blondeau