Keys...

Discovery/practice/training

The first key? To start work and find the pleasure principle.  To start work means being in a position to create, that is to say to catch the material. For instance, to choose an extract, to explore its texture, its form…until it becomes lively and it lets the light in.

Each artistic encounter is unique. One of the performers or one of the creators leads it (author, composer, director, dramatist, stage designer).

The encounter is the first slice, it opens the fruit, it gives the taste and the will to go on biting, transforming, making it one’s own. Lectures, discussions, short presentations, extracts from a show, creation workshops…Each approach, even short ones, gives to the participant a three-cornered contact with a work and an artist.

Master class, internship, seminar, project support: in a detailed manner, the text – from speech to singing- or staging can be explored.

Lights for the voice/ performance and consciousness raising

Short solo concert followed by a moment of transmission with (depending on the project):

Chris Martineau, Isabel Soccoja, Denise Laborde

Meet the artist

Every performance can be followed by an encounter between the artist and a part of the audience in the theatre.

One of those workshops can be aimed at a group already set up (interns) that the artist would meet after the performance, a group of students etc. Some of those workshops are prepared and hosted by a journalist or a university teacher. For instance: encounter with Georges Banu and the artistic team of Ajour by Valère Novarina (Tnba/Grain february 2008 Bordeaux) Workshop « The Opera differently » ( Kampnagel of Hamburg, following one of the performances of Vertiges II, march 2007).

Keys to transmission

Three hours meeting with teachers from high school « staging Novarina »; For instance: Rectorat national workshop at the Translatine festival of Bayonne 2007. Interview of the director followed by a discussion. Extracts on-the-spot with an actor.

Workshop -1h30- on extracts of Novarina with two groups of teachers

Voice and timbre in Stockhausen

Dual lecture- All audiences: Christine Dormoy and a musicologist

Presentation of a selection of works by Stockhausen, sensitive account of an approach, extracts listening

Practical/vocal workshop: Stimmung, ( a capella score)  music of the timbre- for six to eight persons

« Le grain de la voix »The grain of the voice - one to two days course

If the « grain of the voice » (the expression is a quote from Roland Barthes) is an erotic mix of timbre and language, what is the material of this art? The spoken voice, each person’s voice, the addition of all those singular voices’ specificities inside a choir.

► the heterogeneous choir of the city: work on the individual and collective vocal techniquewith the feeling of the « human muzzle », harmonics of resonators. Snapshot of each participant’s voice in its close connection with breath and language. Creation of spoken chorus.

► the homogeneous choir, speaking in one only voice, from a work on the vowel’s colour and transformation and composition of a timbre. In the choice of articulation and timbre itself the work can be a process of imitation and fusion in one vocal identity which then becomes coryphaeus. The choice of a code is linked to the writing of a musical theory of the spoken voice which then leads to composition.

The work widens the hearing and attention to micro-events, and tackles codes: natural voice, lyrical voice, voice in oral transmission songs, and explores some others (toneless voice, naked voice, voice of the memory, voice of inner worlds…) linked to an author or to states inside a performance itself.

► Musicality technical work of language through all the elements of its musicality: breath, timbre, rhythm, phrasing, up-beats, placing, and caesura.

► The spoken/sung: from one voice to another

The workshop connects the sensitive and technical part to extracts of works of authors and composers as: Novarina, Beckett, Deleuze, Aperghis, Stockhausen, Scelsi.  It can be refocused on one author (or one composer), linked to a show, before the beginning of the performances.