SPEECH
Felix M.Ott, Camille Louis, Jennifer Bonn, Frédéric Lombard, Benjamin Brix, Steffen Martin, Felix Büttner, Edgar Leciejewski, Yves-Noel Genod, Emilia Wilhelm, Nina Kurtela, Niels Ulber, Ehud Darash, Juli Reinartz, Thomas Plishke, Kathrin Deufert, Vincent Roumagnac
text by Camille Louis
The project « speech » comes from a question that I, Camille Louis (dramaturge) asked Felix Ott (choreographer, space designer) : what do you want to do WITH stage today ?
We speak to each other in terms of with and not of “on” because neither he nor I can see stage as just a place for representation, a location for a good show we will build and put in front of an audience that we may consider as mere consumers…On the contrary, we see the space of living art as a kind of environment, a specific area shared by a community in a very specific moment and tension guided by this common desire of letting and seeing something happen. Something as a meaning, a significance that demands the involvement of everybody : the ones on stage as well as the audience with his mental activity that has to be impulsed by the performance. And it doesn’t mean that this appearance will be a “common” meaning : it’s something that can come through the common but that may be very singular, very SUBJECTive: we want to consider stage as the place where a subject can appear and be understood in his very specificity by the other persons with who he is sharing this moment of expression. There is a degree of presence (because it is radically in the present time), of attention and of physical involvement allowed by this space that is really rare, that makes of it a particular area and that gives us the desire to work WITH.
To work with stage in order to express ourselves today.
Or, maybe: to work with that because we want to express something about and with Us, TODAY. and stage can be seen as a unique place that can give visibility to all the levels of existence that make our contemporary presences. The HERE and NOW of the performance, delivers a space and an occasion of contemporary communication that we have to consider in its very specificity if we want today to say something and to be heard with that. Today, we are not anymore in the age of the simple, of the one, of the linearity and the progression. We evolve in the “multi”, the “pluri” with the multimedia, the infinite modalities of communication we can choose in order to speak to an other (by presence/just voice/just words written/video….). It changes the nature of our subjectivity: we are done with that, we are multiple. Inside and Outside: in the expression of ourselves that obligatory deals with the many degrees of the visible, of the audible, of the sensible…
If the answer to my initial question can be resumed by : “ to put a real speech, a real subjective process of expression at game in the space of living art”, it is also directly : “to work with all the levels contained today in this act of expression”. The two things come at the same moment, there is no priority of the meaning before the form because the expression comes and appears through this process of multi layers that build it as well. To discover a subject, we have to pass through these different levels, these different media with what a person expresses herself and that give the material of her presence in a game of shifts and sliding.
If we want to invite people (audience) in the space of a subjective speech we have to call together these different media without directing them in regard to something that “has to be said”. It’s in their meeting that the speech as well as the subject will up rise. It will develop little by little, building himself through this process and by the mental attention the audience will give to this “appearance of something” of what it is also responsible. We want to trust the HERE and NOW of the performance as well as its multi levels of significance to find this subjective speech we want to share today. We know that this “today” really asks us to invent new way of public expression: it’s not just to build an interdisciplinary piece, it’s to work really and honestly with the material and principle of our age: same and differences, one and many.
How something like One subject can come in this ground of differences and in the process of their game? We can’t answer before to start. To start not by an addition of several media really defined but by a writing done by them, in their meeting, in their way to contaminate each of them, by sliding from one to an other one…
And to do this common, global writing, we have to start by a focus given to these differences in their possibility of specific expression. It’s a way to go until the end of this desire: to let the speech builds itself through this process and not before it, not by asking these different media to “represent” the topic given at the beginning. It’s not in this direction that we consider contemporary expression and communication work today. It’s through “connections”, through a net work, in an horizontal way where everything as an importance in itself as well as for the common discourse that is building itself…Everything is at work in this very special space and time of the “meeting”, the “in between” that is characteristic of any communication experiment.
That’s why we can’t start otherwise than by asking to each medium to work for itself, to develop itself as if it was the only one involved in this process of expression.
Free development in order to really meet the others.
So, we started the work by asking a question to all the artists we thought about, because of their very specific knowledge and practice (with sound, with light, with video, body…) with what we wanted them to answer:
How would you build this ideal space, this ideal environment for a contemporary speech?
Which quality of, for example, sound or pictures, would you need to let this subjective expression come out?
Which aspect could take the space/surrounding/moment invested just by this thing: your speech?
We want such an open beginning because we want to trust the process of the creation. We want to see this first “conceptual ground” worked by all these different languages or modalities of expression. Because it’s all the interest of this work: to see how someone/something is displaced by an other who retakes it? How it can let appear something not only at the end but also “by the middles”? How this “something” that we name our “contemporary speech” can build itself through this intensive process that is at the same time very sensitive because done only by this network of words/sound/light/bodies…and mental because depending completely on the concentration of the audience. To let this thing happen at the moment of the performance and not to close it before in a “pre thought” creation, we need to focus on the setting up of this environment, made by these different media and the “network at work” of them, knowing that it will produce, each time, a new version of our work. That’s why we just want to put a working frame, a specific rhythm punctuated by different sort of meetings we will give to us and that will appear completely different in regard to the places, the time and the conditions we will experiment in the year. Our frame can be resumed like that (cf. also the schedule)
individual times of researches that can be at distance (ATELIERS) and where each of us will follow to think, with his own sensibility, about the common question.
Gathering of these very different propositions and design of the space to come SCULPTURE)
Setting of this “mixed space” that is done of different levels, that is all a surrounding that we will reinvent each time, regarding to the context where our Speech will take place (SPACE)
For the moment, the artists involved in the project are:
Felix M.Ott: director, space designer and performer
Camille Louis: co director, dramaturge
Jennifer Bonn: sound creator
Frédéric Lombard: light designer
Benjamin Brix: filmaker
Steffen Martin
Yves-Noel Genod: mentor , author, performer
Emilia Wilhelm: singer
Nina Kurtela, Niels Ulber, Ehud Darash, Juli Reinartz: performers
