At last, then, I am allowed to refresh myself in a bath of darkness! (Charles Baudelaire)

An initiation, a ritual itinerary - in Opéra de Lille, transformed to a nocturnal garden.
City noise is being processed in real time into melancholic melodies in the work of Joanna Bailie, in ‘Germinations, Jean-Luc Hervé explores the sound of budding vegetation, While she dances Fumiyo Ikeda listens to the endless sound combinations of Morton Feldman. In the dead of night the concentration is abandoned into a bacchanal of sound with a thousand colors in Terry Riley’s ‘Rainbow in Curved Air’. You leave the Opéra as another person...

IN A FEW WORDS

BAILIE: THE PLACE YOU CAN HEAR
The computer, in real time, filters sounds from outside and passes them through musical harmonies.
— OK, but is it still mus...
— Shush! Listen!

BAILIE: SYMPHONY STREET SOUVENIR
Imitating nature? — No. Reinventing the world? — Not that either.
Catching the sound of the world, then, and resynthesizing it as though you were telling someone a dream? — You’re getting hot.

HERVE/VERSPIEREN: GERMINATIONS
Burgeoning music that’s coming into bud, like life itself; to the extent that, at the very end, it wants to escape from the concert hall. The doors open, revealing Astrid Verspieren’s plant installation: the walk begins.

SCHMID/HUBER: BREATHCORE
Michael Schmid and Christiane Huber describe this group work about breathing as “Non-verbal communication”, considered to be the number one human strength.

FELDMAN/IKEDA: PIANO & STRING QUARTET
A piano, a string quartet and the “sixth musician”: a dancer. Everything is repeated — unless, that is, that nothing is ever repeated. In the words of the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov “Don’t ever ask your way to someone who knows it. You run the risk of not getting lost”.

TERRY RILEY: RAINBOW IN CURVED AIR
Pop or classical? Written or improvised? Static or lively? Things couldn’t be more ambiguous; midnight must be just round the corner.

BREATHCORE

BREATHCORE is a choir exploring modes of collectivity through the practice of breathing.
Breath is archaic and contains a wide spectrum of characteristics - tactile, sonic, vibrational. Performers let their breath resonate and create a field of blurred respiratory noisescapes. Their individual breath signatures interact, barely detectable, creating an atmosphere of diluted presences. BREATHCORES are without conductor or score and vary in format and form. Rehearsals and public moments are researching synchronization-processes, skill-sharing and non-verbal communication. Each BREATHCORE becomes a unique momentary snapshot of the group’s collective qualities.
(Michael Schmid | Christiane Huber)

PIANO & STRING QUARTET

This “chamber dance” performance leads us into the heart of Morton Feldman’s art (1926–1987): an 80-minute work for piano and strings, radiating a quiet halo of light, where “every something is an echo of nothing”.
The dancer-cum-choreographer Fumiyo Ikeda shares the same space as her fellow performers, the instrumentalists, as if she were a sixth musician. No stage set, no backstage, no frills: everything is laid bare. The “imprecise repetitions” of Ikeda’s movements are tantamount to a gentle creation of spatial sculpture, a temporal phenomenon, in common with Feldman’s music. The audience is out of its depth with this interweaving of the familiar with the unpredictable, where memory becomes unfocused, goes astray, and in the end agrees to succumb.