Premiere: June 1, 2024 – Nuit Blanche – Haut/Bas/Fragiles, Africolor, Bobigny
Commissioned by: Les Percussions de Strasbourg
Musicians: 4 percussionists
Duration: 20′
A tournament. Tournaments. A stadium, runners – musician-sportsmen and sportsmen-musicians. Blurred boundaries between the roles of each… an audience and amateurs called upon to contribute their stone to the edifice of a strange rhythmic cathedral. And the sheer joy of turning a mysterious mechanism of time. No anthem as a prelude – the anthem is the race itself. What could be more cyclical than laps around the track? Each musician, athlete, amateur, audience, with his or her own means, invents the music harnessed to the fantastic spatial and temporal framework of a race. La Fantaisie tournoyante is a meeting of sport and music in the place of rhythm. The steps set the pace, and sport and music are not just about individual performance: they are also about teamwork and solidarity – just think of what a rugby scrum is like, or the unmistakable color of a particular vocal ensemble. In the whirlwind fantasy, solidarity is expressed through the interdependence of each of the players in the performance: the runners’ step times are linked to the sounds of the percussionists, the sprinters’ races mark the major sound stages of an imaginary musical race, and so on. No conductor, no master of time, but a precise mechanics of sound and movement in which all the actors, interconnected, participate in a common work. Where steps set the pace. A device that reveals the music of the body. Microphones, sensors and sound diffusion will make sensitive an ordinarily quieter dimension of the mechanics of bodies in movement: they will reveal the organic rhythm of the races, the “songs of effort”. The time of the athletes’ steps will be connected (via sensors) to the percussionists’ strikes on wooden drums. Phasing, phase shifting… the intertwined pulsations invite us to hear the athletes’ “natural” polyvitality. To make their rhythms sensitive, to sharpen our perceptions of the body’s rhythmic layers. The microphone acts as a veritable magnifying glass for the rhythms, allowing us to hear the scansions of the athletes’ out-of-phase breathing. A veritable crescendo capable of giving the music its formal trajectory, it is the dramaturgical backbone of the performance. Layers of speed To the phasing and dephasing of the steps and breaths are added numerous (!) sound tracks. These are the speed layers of this fantasy. The sprinter races marking the half-turns of the tracks will create a great tohu-bohu by activating a percussion installation, a veritable amusement park-like sound playground.
The rhythm will also be set by musician-runners, performing a spiral course, littered with gongs to punctuate the race. The music will also be punctuated by the participation of amateur choirs. An improbable version of the Icelandic Viking clap will be performed contrapuntally, grandstand against grandstand, as if the baroque ideas of Gabrielli-style polychoral music had found a new space of expression in a stadium: the clamor itself plays with phasing.
Tricks…
The turns of the musician-runners will be matched by the twirls of the musician-athletes: Musicians armed with cymbals swirl around the skins on which they rub, creating a continuum of sound; the music of the rhombes swirls in the air; the eyes of the percussionists slowly follow the race as they turn, listening for the click of the footsteps in their helmets… The turns and twirls create the soundtrack to the performance, and also provoke intoxication, a strange form of trance, underlined by the amplified counter-pulses of the footsteps.