For two hours we remain glued in front of this space, which is empty of any human body, and yet intensely populated. [...] The technical performance fades away before the acuity of the gesture, the caresses of the music and all these voices carrying words that carry us endlessly with them.
Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, Mediapart, November 2022

Fascinatingly detailed, this entanglement gives a dramaturgical impetus to the five acts. They flow until they end in a confusion of notes and words, music and sound extracts, which have become totally inseparable.
Vincent Bouquet, SceneWeb, November 2022

In trying to give voice to an era – our own – where the volume is turned up to eleven,
since 2007, L’Encyclopédie de la Parole has been collecting and analysing, one by one, hundreds of samples of everyday speech, drawn from all possible sources – from the street, an academic conference, a YouTube clip –
building up a ‘precarious, shifting, living tribute to the diversity of oral expression’.
This exercise produces a particular tone of music, grafted onto the energy of speech: a rhythmic fever with an infinitely variable melody.
This fourth suite, a final act, is suffused with the fading light of dusk. Like all vocal recordings that evoke the aura of a vanishing event, the aim (quoting Joris Lacoste quoting Paul Verlaine) is to bring to life the music of dear voices heard no more.
Original music by Pierre-Yves Macé and Sébastien Roux.

For the final performance in its series of Suites, l’Encyclopédie de la parole has chosen to make you hear the raw material that makes up its sound collection and provides the basis for its performances: its recorded voices.

No longer is it actors that give life to lost voices, but the speakers themselves who return from the past to speak with their own voices, their original melody, their unique tone, their own breath.

Spatialised by Sébastien Roux, the words sound out from the stage, carrying with them spaces, images, situations, frictions, blocs of tension or emotion, major or insignificant events – a thousand living details captured by the recording, played once again for us.

As in opera, the voices are supported, carried, transported by the instrumental accompaniment: performed by eight musicians, Pierre-Yves Macé’s score shifts our listening to reveal hidden textures. Blending the acoustic and the electric, displaying unusual combinations of timbres, the composition exacerbates perception and gives rise to emotions that are literally unbelievable.

A kind of theatre of spirits then, but with living ghosts who speak, whisper, shout, address, laugh, converse, count, recount, explain, preach and console, rage and encourage, desire and regret, pray and give thanks, dance and suffer and live and do not want to die.

By focusing on the minute and infinite modulations of human speech, Suite No. 4 is a celebration of the most lively and the most fleeting: a way for ‘the music of dear voices heard no more’ to ring out for one last time.

Joris Lacoste