Encyclopédie de la parole

Joris Lacoste / Pierre-Yves Macé / Sébastien Roux / Ictus – Suite nº4

Archive 2020
MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis
aprilapr 15 – 18

© © Christophe Urbain ©

© © Christophe Urbain ©

© © Christophe Urbain ©

© © Christophe Urbain ©

© © Christophe Urbain ©

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Concept, Encyclopédie de la parole and Ensemble Ictus
Dramaturgical composition and direction by Joris Lacoste
Instrumental music composition, Pierre-Yves Macé
Electro-acoustic music composition, Sébastien Roux
With Hugo Abraham (double-bass), Tom De Cock (percussion), Chryssi Dimitriou (flute), Luca Piovesan (accordion), Jean-Luc Plouvier (keyboard), Eva Reiter (viol, Paetzold flute), Primož Sukič (electric guitar, acoustic guitar)
Sound, Stéphane Leclercq, and Alexandre Fostier
Stage design and lighting, Florian Leduc
Artistic collaboration, Elise Simonet, Oscar Lozano Pérez, and Nicolas Rollet
 Choreographic advice, Marie Goudot
Document collection, Julie Etienne, Joris Lacoste, Oscar Lozano Pérez, and Elise Simonet
Invited collectors, Harris Baptiste (HT), Charlotte de Bekker (NL), Sachith Joseph Cheruvatur (ML), Sibel Diker (TR), Lucas Guimarães (BR), Otto Kakhidze (KA), Priscila Natany (BR), Nicolas Rollet (IT), Ghita Serraj (AR), and Ece Vitrinel (TR)
With help from Naby Moïse Bangoura, Anne Chaniolleau, Maria Cojocariu, Hélène Collin, Pauline et Balthazar Curnier-Jardin, Monica Demuru, David-Alexandre Guéniot, João Fiadeiro, Oleg Khristolyubskiy, Anneke Lacoste, Kathy Kyunghoo Lee, Sabine Macher, Federico Paino, Jin Young Park, Sergiu Popescu, Irina Ryabikina, and Ling Zhu
Graphic design, Oscar Lozano Pérez
Production and administration, Edwige Dousset and Garance Crouillère
Produced by Échelle 1 :1 in partnership with Ensemble Ictus
With support from Fondation d’entreprise Hermès as part of its New Settings programme
Coproduced by TNS – Théâtre National de Strasbourg ; Wiener Festwochen ; Kunstenfestivaldesarts ; Kaaitheater (Brussels) ; Ensemble Ictus ; Teatro Municipal do Porto ; Le Quartz – scène nationale de Brest ; MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis (Bobigny) ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris // In association with MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis (Bobigny) ; and Festival d’Automne à Paris
Echelle 1:1 is accredited by the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / DRAC Île-de-France and receives financial support from Région Île-de-France. In partnership with Ensemble Ictus, supported by the European Commission, Communauté Flamande - Vlaamse Overheid et Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommisie
Suite n°4 was in residency at Subs – Lyon, for the 2019-20 season.
In partnership with France Culture

For the final show in the series of choral suites, the Encyclopédie de la parole has chosen to make heard in a direct manner the stuff of its sound collection, used in the writing of the shows: recordings of the spoken word.

In Suite n°4, it is no longer actors who lend their bodies to disappeared voices, but the characters themselves who come back from the past in order to speak to us with their own voices, with their unique melody, inimitable tone, and way of breathing. Using a sound design by Sébastien Roux, words enter and leave the stage, bringing with them spaces, images, situations, sections of tension or emotion, and events ranging from the major to the microscopic. Just as in opera, the voices are sustained, carried along, and transported by the instrumental music: interpreted by seven members of the Ictus ensemble, Pierre-Yves Macé’s score shifts our listening focus from place to place and teases up hidden accents. By mixing acoustic and electric together, and by summoning up tonal associations of a unique nature, it heightens perception. The result is thus a sort of theatre of phantoms, but with ghosts that are very much alive and which speak, whisper, shout, apostrophise, laugh, count, recount, explain, preach and console, rant and encourage, desire and regret, dance, suffer, rejoice, live and have no desire whatsoever to die. By honing in on the infinite, infinitesimal modulations of the human spoken word, Suite n°4 is a celebration of all that is very much alive and fleeting. As such, it is a way of sounding, one last time, “the inflection of voices once dear to us but which have fallen into silence”.

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