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jusqu’à la dernière minute on a espéré que certains n’iraient pas.
(2006)
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jusqu’à la dernière minute on a espéré que certains n’iraient pas.
(2006)
Conception, scenic design and spatial action: Christian Rizzo Lighting: Caty Olive Electronics: Gérome Nox Bass, bass guitar: Bruno Chevillon Drums, etc.: Didier Ambact Sound: Roland Auffret Stage Manager: Jean-Michel Hugo Length: 1hr 15 min
…what if we moved in a slightly oblique direction?
Live music and lighting have always been very important in my work. Now I’d like to go more deeply into the relationship that sound has with light phenomena and spatial actions. In order to stop seeing these media as accompaniments to dance, I decided to create a dialogue between them where the dancing is not the focus of the performance. The 4 performers and I (electronics, drums, bass and lighting) will attempt to connect and weave together our individual processes using notions of mass, detail and appearance-disappearance. This ‘‘visual concert’’ is an experiment in which the body is fragmented by time, space and electric movement. This new Association Fragile adventure opened in Brest at the Festival des Antipodes, featuring three musicians and longstanding partners (Gérome Nox, Bruno Chevillon and Didier Ambact ) as well as Caty Olive who has been our lighting designer since 1998. Choosing these artists for this project has allowed me to continue exploring my obsessions about theatre and life. This proposal – centred around a score for sound, light and space – could also be seen as the first stage of a new piece for 2007.
Producer: l’Association Fragile Coproduced by: Le Quartz, scène nationale de Brest – Le Vivat, scène conventionnée d’Armentières. With support from the Centre National de la Danse de Pantin
Support for l’Association Fragile is provided by the Ile-de-France Cultural Affairs Department of the French Ministry of Culture, as a grant to a registered dance company. It also receives support from Cultures France for its tours abroad. Since 2007, l’association fragile / Christian Rizzo has been in residence at the Opéra de Lille.
schedule
2007 february 14 Le Vivat, scène conventionnée – Armentières – France
2006 march 9 - 11 Le Quartz, scène nationale / festival Les Antipodes – Brest –France
press clips
‘‘The set is minimalist, containing almost nothing. Just two white panels and a few props. The musicians – an exceptional trio composed of Gerome Nox on electronics, the terrific drummer Didier Ambact, and Bruno Chevillon who ‘‘plays’’ bass and electric guitar – and stage manager Caty Olive (who modulates the lighting as if caressing the void) are relegated to stage left, along an ‘‘offside’’ line. That’s all there is. Christian Rizzo walks onstage. It’s a cold start-up – as if to conjure up a blank page, or the texture of a bare canvas. Who’s going to kick off? It’s anyone’s guess. You’re immediately caught up in a world where time is suspended, prolonged, and punctuated by pulsating music that alternately massages and hammers the atmosphere. Rizzo stretches with the space, gliding panels like tectonic plates, reshaping how you see, diffracting perspectives and dissolving borders. As the stage dissolves, one is left with the impression of dream images that persist throughout the day, or the afterglow from a parallel world. Christian Rizzo’s body seems to melt into this architecture of sound, light, signs and gestures that establish a different way of seeing, perceiving space and time. Is it a performance? Definitely. Provided that you allow yourself to slide into this uncharted world and get caught up in the contemplation. If so, it will really grab you.’’ Agnès Izrine - magazine Danser- May 06
‘‘Christian Rizzo likes to play around with the obsessive themes he loves – disappearance, movement, stillness, volume and time. He blends music, dance and visual arts, lighting and space like a master of ceremonies. You can’t tell if it’s a concert, a dance performance, a sound installation or something else that remains to be invented – an atmospheric landscape created with spare and simple movements. Visuals harmonize with sound effects, lighting turns into sound, and the musicians become actors in the choreography, creating an impression of life and death. Tension is followed by contemplation. That’s how Rizzo produces his vision of the world, arranging it in his own way while playing with the dramatic potential of the moment.’’ Ouest-France – 11 March 2006
‘‘Christian Rizzo creates energetic and demanding new forms featuring a real and imaginary world where dancing is no longer the focus of the performance.’’ Le figaro – 10 March 2006
‘‘Jusqu’à la dernière minute on a espéré que certains n’iraient pas is a remarkable new piece by iconoclast Christian Rizzo that attracted a lot of attention and threw some poetry into the rather unhappy mix.’’ Hervé Pons – festiv’all- April 2006
‘‘What emerges from Christian Rizzo’s concert is ‘‘an experiment in which the body is fragmented by time, space and electric movement’’. In Jusqu’à la dernière minute on a espéré que certains n’iraient pas, Rizzo invites his team onstage – Cathy Olive, Didier Ambact, Bruno Chevillon and Gerome Nox – both literally and figuratively. He creates a screen of light with three mobile partitions, and an obstacle course with a series of silver balls in this all-terrain piece with its peaks and troughs. Rizzo himself seems to shrink under your very eyes, lost in the pared-down set. The stage and sound play off one another and work well together in the end. A vintage Rizzo.’’ Philippe Noisette- Les Inrockuptibles- 28 March 2006
biographies of associate artists
didier ambact From 1991, Ambact wass a drummer with Treponem Pal, a pioneering group that spearheaded the industrial metal wave in France and helped spur the revival of dub. The group was never too far from the glare of the limelight, with its famous opening acts (Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Faith No More, etc.), European tours, high-profile festivals (Dour, Transmusicales), a recording in the US and an appearance on Canal+. Shortly before the group ended its collaboration, Didier Ambact gave up drums for electronic music and, in 1998, created an even more radical group – as if the break-up of Treponem Pal had left him with no choice but to switch into higher gear. Fast Forward offered a fusion of the hardest elements from the music scene of the time: techno hardcore, extreme heavy-metal, industrial music. His subsequent stints with groups such as Micropoint (drummer) and General Dub (composer) ultimately sealed his reputation as a workaholic with an enviable musical range and versatility. It is worth noting that a first-of-its-kind experiment, with General Dub, combining buto dance with industrial dub, has led to Ambact’s participation this year in Gerome Nox’s and Christian Rizzo’s project. Selective recording history: Treponem Pal: Excess and Overdrive (1993), Higher (1997) / Fast Forward: Public Disorder (2001) / General Dub: Guerres Médiatiques [Media Wars] (2003) / Micropoint: Remontée [Ascent] (2005).
bruno chevillon He was born in 1959, studied at the Beaux-Arts School in Avignon, where in 1983 he was awarded the National Diploma of Plastic Expression. While he was studying there he also entered the Conservatoire de Musique, studying classical double bass with Joseph Fabre . In 1983 he began playing jazz and improvising in a special class at the Conservatory. He also met Louis Sclavis with whom he has collaborated ever since. They performed in many concerts in France and all over the world, while also participating in the recording of many different kinds of music for theatre, dance and film. In 1994, he created a solo based on the poet, writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, a work in which he was instrumentalist, composer and speaker, P. P. P. ou la rage sublime (P.P.P or the sublime rage). He has continued to work in theatre, in dance with Christian Rizzo, contemporary music both written and improvised with Samuel Sighicelli and Benjamin de la Fuente as part of the group Caravaggio, as a soloist, on the project “Soffio di Scelsi” around the music of Giacinto Scelsi, with Jean-Marc Foltz and Stephan Oliva, and in improv with Jean- Marc Foltz, Hasse Poulsen, Guillaume Roy, Franck Vigroux, Sophie Agnel and Pascal Contet. Currently he works regularly with Marc Ducret, Michel Portal, Franck Vigroux, Stephan Oliva, Guillaume Roy, Christophe Marguet and Régis Huby, and he has played or continues to play with Sophie Agnel, the Quatuor Arditti, Joey Baron, Tim Berne, François Corneloup, Dave Douglas, Barry Guy, Jean-Pierre Drouet, Joèlle Léandre, Paul Motian, Dominique Pifarely, Hasse Poulsen, Barre Phillips and Frances-Marie Uitti ... he has also recorded over thirty albums.
gerome nox (aka G-Nox) Gerome Nox is a product of the Beaux Arts school. But he has been moving in a world of “cutting-edge” music since the early 1980s, the decade during which he founded the industrial music group, NOX. These days, Nox’s work blends rhythms, electronic and electro-acoustic manipulations, and city sounds and atmosphere. It is a body of work whose occasionally violent energy evokes the in-your-face edginess of bustling urban life, creating soundscapes that are constantly evolving, and in which power and excess alternate with minimalism and refinement. As one who considers sound more as matter, and instruments as so many means for producing and shaping music, Nox is as much a visual artist as a musician. It is in this perspective that, while not abandoning a traditional instrument such as the electric guitar, he increasingly turned to electronic instruments – and especially computers – that allowed him to treat the sound in terms of texture, density, volume, resistance and spatialisation. Nox has collaborated on numerous new musical and audiovisual works, performances, and choreographic works. These diverse collaborations have led him to work with the following artists: Cecile Babiole (multimedia artist), Laure Bonicel (choreographer), Alain Declercq (visual artist), Christophe Fiat (sound poet), Emmanuelle Huynh (choreographer), P. Nicolas Ledoux (visual artist), Claude Leveque (visual artist), Barbara Mavro Thalassitis (choreographer), Michèle Murray (choreographer), Christian Rizzo (visual artist/choreographer), Kasper T. Toeplitz (musician/composer). Nox has performed at the following venues and events: The House of World Cultures (Berlin), The Cultural Centre of Belem (Lisbon), the Bratislava Dance Festival (Bratislava), the festival Musique Action (CCAM Nancy/Vandoeuvre), the festival Nouvelles Scènes (Dijon), the Cartier Foundation (Paris), The Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona), Melkweg (Amsterdam), DANCE (Munich), the Hebbel (Berlin), the Museion (Bolzano, Italy), etc. Interview excerpts and press reviews can be found on the M-Tronic label’s website: www.m-tronic.com
caty olive Caty Olive received her degree in stage design from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. She divides her activities as a lighting designer among several types of projects: - Dance: working with Marco Berrettini, Christophe Haleb, Martine Pisani, Myriam Gourfink, Emmanuelle Huynh, Claudia Triozzi and Christian Rizzo in France; and Vera Mantero and Tiago Guedes, in Portugal. - Architecture and exhibitions: Cartier International, Parc de la Villette, the Château de Versailles, Espace Electra, The Museum of the Cinema, Midi Minuit, The Museum of Fashion - Fashion: Cartier, de Beers, Rayon Vert/Hermès. She has also done research on light installations: Portrait de Frans Poelstra, Structure multifonctions, Cabinet des méduses, une exposition des caustiques. In all these diverse projects, Caty Olive shows a particular interest in questions arising from the displacement and instability of light.
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Contact
catherine meneret l’association fragile / christian rizzo 9, rue de la pierre levée 75 011 Paris
tel : +33 (0)1 48 00 83 59
[email protected] www.lassociationfragile.com
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