The Tale of the « Tale »
Louis Clément, Delphine Descombin, Yovan Girard, Maxime Hurdequint
Edition and page lay-out: Jean-Charles François
March 2024
The four protagonists have collaborated to a spectacle entitled “Le Conte d’un future commun” [The Tale of a Common Future] with:
Louis Clément, project instigator, public participation and drawing animation.
Delphine Descombin, storyteller.
Maxime Hurdequint, drawings.
Yovan Girard, music.
The texts are the result of four separate interviews with each artist during 2023, by Nicolas Sidoroff and Jean-Charles François.
Summary :
1. Delphine’s story
2. Architecture’s studies, Louis and Maxime
3. Delphine’s journey to Africa
4. Yovan Girard, the musician.
5. Delphine’s return to France
6. Maxime’s hesitations between architecture and drawing.
7. Yovan ‘s Story (continued)
8.Delphine’s story (continued). Trapeze and storytelling.
9. Louis and Maxime’s stories (continued)
10. Yovan’s Story (continued), the project « A Violin for my School ».
11. Delphine, the Tale of the Skull and the Fisherman.
12. The little notebook with trees. Maxime Hurdequint, Maxime Touroute and Louis Clément.
13. Delphine’s story (continued). The Tale of Tom Thumb.
14. Delphine and storytelling. Maxime and architecture and drawings. Yovan and composition.
15. The Live Drawing Project
16. Delphine : Two tales.
17. Origin of the “Tale of a Common Future”.
18. The AADN immersive project.
19. The “Tale of a Common Future”.
20. Louis, one year to reflect.
21. The writing of the Tale. Louis and Delphine..
22. The drawings and their animation, Louis and Maxime..
23. A traditional music of the future?
24. Music elaboration: pre-recorded or live music. Louis and Yovan.
25. Music and storytelling, Delphine et Yovan.
26. Music and storytelling. Louis et Yovan
27. Yovan’s ideas on music and Maxime’s ideas on drawings.
28. The Tale and drawings. Delphine, Maxime et Louis.
29. Sonorization
30. Communication with Notion.
31. Residencies: LabLab, Chevagny, Vaulx-en-Velin, Enghien-les-Bains.
32. Public participation.
33. The artistic and cultural education residency at Hennebont. Louis, Delphine and Yovan.
34. The residencies (continued): Paris, Nantes.
35. Ecology. Delphine.
36. Conclusion
1. Delphine’s Story
Delphine:
Where does the Tale come from? It’s by telling the Tale that we’ll arrive at the Tale… The Tale comes from when I was in high school and I met Marie Jourdain, the daughter of Marie-France Marbach [1], who used to tell me stories. I didn’t go to a regular school, I was at boarding school. And Marie was telling me stories all the time. And I met her mother and Geo Jourdain. I loved these people who were completely different from what I had as reference in my family. They woulod take me to school, to the boarding school on Sunday evenings and would bring me back on Friday evenings. I spent a lot of time with Marie, who talked to me about Africa, who told me a lot of stories. After that, I left high school and went to Africa. There, I heard lots of stories, lots of tales. And then, when I came back from Africa, Marie-France absolutely wanted me to tell the story of my trip. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t at all ready to talk in front of people. She took me by surprise, and I often attended her performances. She gave me the opportunity to go to workshops, she really believed in me, when I really didn’t. So, I stayed in close contact with Marie-France.
The boarding school was in Louhans, it was a visual arts school. It was the only high school that accepted me because I had very bad marks, and I wasn’t following school at all. It was my aunt who found this high school that was willing to accept me. I stayed outside. I didn’t go to classes. I was under the trees listening to the birds, I wasn’t in the mood to be locked in a class. Often, the director summoned me, and we had some very interesting philosophical discussions. So, it was as if he had me join the 12th grade philosophy course. Then, he’d ask me what I wanted to do later in life, and I’d say: “I don’t know, maybe take care of goats, perhaps…” I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but it’s true, these were important questions that nobody had ever asked me before. It’s true that I had the chance to meet some special people. And I really liked the visual arts courses. There were two visual arts teachers who were amazing, they took us to Lyon to see exhibitions, we even went to Strasbourg to see museums, it was great, so these were the courses I attended, I was allowed to create things. As for the rest of the courses, I really rejected them, yeah, they bored me a lot. That’s why afterward I took my backpack and I got the desire to go to Africa. The journey lasted quite a long time because I stopped along the way, I didn’t have any money. I worked as a seasonal worker, in hotels-restaurants, I was doing services and they provided lodging at the same time. I sold croissants, I worked in bakeries, I did all sorts of jobs. And then, I met someone in the street who was spitting fire, who taught me how to do it. This was my first real job: we’d spit fire, I’d spit fire and then I’d beg. In fact, I’d blow bubbles in front of a bakery, telling poetry. I hated all this, I found it unbearable, but I always managed to do something.
2. Architecture Studies, Louis and Maxime
Louis:
My background story starts on December 23, 1986. I don’t know how far back I can go, but I think my parents are no strangers to what shaped me. So, I think that if we go back very far, one could say that what shaped me was the discovery of reading, and then above all the reading of what we call imaginary fiction, anything related to science fiction, fantasy, etc. And then, from a more professional point of view, or in any case in terms of my studies, I passed a scientific baccalaureate, then I studied architecture at the Paris-Val de Seine architectural school and graduated from it. At the end of my Licence, I started to realize that architecture wasn’t really for me. In fact, I already had the somewhat utopian idea that becoming an architect would enable me to conceive of spaces in which people would feel good and above all that it would help them to think, to change the world.
Maxime:
My cousin Louis Clément also studied architecture. We’re a year apart, and we didn’t do that in concert, we went our separate ways. I was at the INSA in Strasbourg and he was at the Val de Seine in Paris, we followed our own path. This was a period in our lives when we saw each other less often, but we talked a little about architecture.
Louis:
And then I was confronted with the Master and with the realities of construction, the fact that, if you become an architect, you become a builder. You work in more or less big firms, and ultimately your work is extremely determined by budgetary considerations. And so, I thought that it would not interest so much. Even so, I did my Master’s first year in Antwerp (Belgium), it went fairly well, and I was already starting to think a little that I was going towards performing arts, scenography, etc. And then, in my Master’s second year I sort of eeked by, but I got the diploma all the same. Then I had the chance to work for an architect, I did my Master’s internship at “Scène scénographie”, which is a very good enterprise. We worked on the scenography of the “Musée d’Alésia”, the “Grotte Chauvet II”, so I had the chance to count the stalactites for many hours, this was enormously interesting! Interesting but… It was fun in any case, to work on beautiful projects.
Maxime :
During the last year of high school, I applied to an architecture school, it might have been in Lyon or Grenoble, I went there with my hands in my pockets, thinking: “To be an architect is a trade that you learn, so I’m not going to learn it beforehand!” I crashed, and my only solution was to go to a preparatory school. So then I was in the first year of a preparatory school.
Louis :
And then, when I started to work as an architect, I got a job with François Pin who is an architect who also run a music festival in quarries, in the “Carrières de Normandoux[2], and he created the Marbrerie in Montreuil (a suburb of Paris). I worked on the Marbrerie project, which was one of the biggest projects, the most interesting that I could do as an architect: it was a multi-programmatic project, with an artist’s residency, a swimming pool, a restaurant, an architecture agency, a performance hall, and furthermore I was in charge of sketching it. So, I could have really been very happy, and I stayed almost six months. In fact, it didn’t make me happy at all, so I thought that, if I was not happy there, then I didn’t see what I was still doing in architecture, because, I thought I wasn’t going to find a more interesting job.
Maxime :
With Louis, my cousin, we influence each other, maybe because we know each other very well. That is to say that when we grew up, we saw each other on a regular basis, we never really lost touch. So, this is the reason that it’s always a fluid relationship between us, we never yell at each other, in fact we don’t really need to. I think we adjust one another perfectly, that’s how we influence each other. I imagine that, as we both studied architecture, we speak the same language, it helps us to communicate of certain concepts, I don’t need to explain to him such and such architectural project.
3. Delphine’s journey to Africa
Delphine:
It took me a year, from the age of 17 to 18, to collect enough money for my trip to Africa. I worked during the summer and winter seasons. In any case my mother wouldn’t allow me to cross the border. So, when I turned 18, I immediately crossed the Spanish border. At 18 I no longer feared being prevented from doing so by send police. In fact, I’d already been arrested at police stations, and they were tracking me, they track street people, they have their photos, and they know where they are. They knew I lived on the street, that’s funny, because they didn’t know this until they arrested me.
I went all the way down to Spain. I took the boat in Gibraltar, I arrived in Morocco, and then I went down to Mauritania, and on to Dakar in Senegal. After that, I really wanted to go to Burkina Faso, because I’d met some Burkinabe in France and I wanted to go and visit them, they were dancers and percussionists. So, I took the train to Bamako, Mali, where I took another train to go to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, it took 48 hours by train to get there, it’s very long. Then I went to Koudougou, they lived there. I stayed there for a while, I was there for a year and a half.
At one point in Africa, I asked myself what exactly I was doing there? What’s the purpose for me to be there? I was white, so, in a subtle way, I didn’t seem to be living there, – look, I wasn’t a tourist! – but I was there, and I didn’t have much to do there, I could simply let myself live, live with the people, but I had the impression of having a real dilemma in my head. We had great discussions, it was super cool what I went through intellectually. For example, in Burkina Faso, we were there drinking tea and talking. They’re really very interesting intellectuals, but it’s not the same kind of intellectuals as in France, we don’t come from the same thing. And in fact, I really missed Western intellectual thinking. It was also lack of books too, of this kind of nourishment, I missed that a lot. And what’s more, it also didn’t make sense for me: there were a lot of problems over there, they couldn’t sell their wheat because there was so much competition, there were societal problems.
I remember once, I was in the desert, and I heard a guy with his tiny radio, and he said to me: “Yes, I think that in your country, things aren’t going very well, there’s a man who might be elected.” In fact, it was Le Pen, against Chirac at the time. And I remember that I said to myself: “What am I doing here, when it’s over there perhaps, that the root of the problem lies?” Everything was beautiful, the landscapes were magnificent, the weather was fine, there was a very cool way of life compared to here. And at the same time, I thought: “I don’t belong here, what am I doing here?” It was a bit of a dilemma. That’s why I came back, it no longer made sense for me to be there.
Going over there saved my life, it saved my ass. When I was in France, people said that I was crazy, my family said that I was crazy, well, I was a bit lost. And when I arrived in Africa, there was that family spirit, something completely natural, I found it super sane, hyper normal. I had lots of difficulties in France, and it was not the case in Africa. When I came back to France, I was part of a bunch of friends, we were a real gang, it was a family for me, something I didn’t have before. All this bunch, they are still my friends.
4. Yovan Girard, the Musician.
Yovan:
I’ve been a musician for a long time. I’m basically a violinist, so, I studied classical music and jazz. I am issued from a family of musicians, my father, Jean-Luc Girard, is a composer, he wrote a fair number of pieces, that are, let’s say, classical, but always a bit hybrid. I have the impression I am also following this pathway, in the sense that he also listened to a lot of rock, and he listened to what we played. He liked composers who were a little extraterrestrial, like Frank Zappa (I don’t particularly like Zappa), he always made us listen to plenty of different kinds of music, he wasn’t an ayatollah of jazz or rock, he was quite open-minded. My brother, Simon Girard, is a trombonist, and we’ve always played together. Simon and I had a band, and we played together in a fair number of groups. Simon’s very much into jazz, even if he’s played in popular music groups. At the beginning the connection between us was jazz. I’ve known Louis Clément since early childhood. Louis’ parents, Sylvie Drouin and Dominique Clément, and my parents knew each other very well for a long time.
5. Delphine’s return to France
Delphine:
I went back to France, and I landed in Montceau-les-Mines and there I stayed for a long while. Well, already I’d fallen in love with a boy who was a stone carver and a painter, and I lived there with a bunch of friends in a house with mattresses on the floor. The problem is, when you’re settling down and become sedentary, that’s when you really become poor, because you have to pay the rent, the electricity, the water. Before that I never felt that I was poor. But there, it was really the case, I had no dough and I had to live.
Scene 1: Delphine with the woman social worker
A social worker:
I suggest you attend a training program called IRFA-Bourgogne. [3].
Delphine:
What’s it all about?
Social worker:
It’s a training organization that helps you to try several jobs, several trades of your choice, you approach companies, and then you go. There are about twenty people in this training program, some working in funeral parlors, others in shelving, in a telephone call center, some doing housework, laundry…
Delphine:
… all sorts of things that didn’t suit me, I couldn’t see myself doing that.
Social worker
You know, there might be other things outside that, you could go and see, I don’t know if they’ll hire you, but you can go and see…
Delphine:
I will try the Atelier du Coin [4] in Montceau and the Gus Circus in Saint-Vallier [5].
Scene 2: At the Gus Circus.
A guy from the Gus Circus:
Hello Delphine.
Delphine:
Would you like to be my friend?
A guy from the Gus Circus:
Yes. Come, you do tight rope, you do juggling, you can come here every day, whenever you want, the door is always open.
Delphine:
I like it, I’ll be able to train like that.
A guy from the Gus Circus:
You know, the Gus Circus basically doesn’t want to hire anyone.
Delphine:
It doesn’t matter, I am going to stay there, it’ll work, it suits me. I have already the fiber to do that, because when I was on the street, I’ve already spat fire and juggled with balls.
Delphine:
So, they offered me a job on a subsidized contract, it was my first job, my first long term contract, for six months. Then I stayed to teach children for maybe three years, I don’t remember exactly. I think they renewed the contract once, these were subsidized contracts for non-profit organizations (associations), something not very expensive that was 80% reimbursed by the State, so they were able to do it. An after that, they actually hired me, they figured out that having one more person brought them more children to teach, so it worked for them. So, I worked for the Gus Circus of Saint-Vallier for a certain time, I don’t even know how long…
I worked in all the disciplines: clown, tightrope, trapeze, juggling. I got the BIAC diploma [6] [Brevet d’initiation aux arts du cirqueto teach circus arts. And then, the association imploded from the inside. In fact, it was the students’ parents who were the bosses, and it went very badly, there were conflicts of interest, conflicts of power. As we were just employees, we couldn’t have a say in the matter, it was their decision, and as a result, things exploded, so my friend and me both left. And I went on a professional trapeze training with a trapezist in Moux-en-Morvan, a completely crazy trapezist, Nicole Durot [7], who did performances under a helicopter, under a Montgolfier, in a word, trapeze without security. She’s 60 years old! When she took me on in training, she was still doing that kind of things, she was a warrior. I stayed for six months with her in intensive training.
6. Maxime’s Hesitations between Architecture and Drawing
Scene: Maxime’s meeting with the Venerable Member of the Grand Council.
The Venerable Member of the Grand Council:
Maxime, after this year in a preparatory program, how do you see your future?
Maxime:
I followed the program very seriously, and I came out of it honorably, but now I’m beginning to wonder.
The Venerable:
What interests you? Becoming an engineer?
Maxime:
No, I don’t want to be an engineer, that doesn’t really interest me, in fact I think that I want really to be an architect.
The Venerable:
Did you do any drawing?
Maxime:
Like all children, I used to draw, and I think I was encouraged a little.
The Venerable:
Can you show me your drawings?
Maxime:
Yes, here they are.
The Venerable:
Your drawings are good.
Maxime:
Drawing motivated me to continue. I know that my brothers were very good at drawing, but I don’t know why, it encouraged me to persist. And it’s true that as a child, my parents sent me to an art school, and I think that it does in fact eventually opens doors. I would go to that school every Wednesday for one hour, and the teacher would provide ideas for drawing, what I liked, it’s that he said:
The ghost of the drawing teacher:
Here we are, I don’t know, you are going to draw figures, and you are going to do it in such a way so that the feet touch the bottom of the sheet, the head the top of the sheet.
Maxime:
In fact, it reminded me of the Greek or Egyptian friezes, and so, I liked this idea of setting the rules of a fairly simple game, and then we would do it, and we could see that the results were all different. That’s pretty much what I retained, you fix a totally arbitrary rule for yourself, and it brings about all kinds of possible results. I would have liked to go to an art design school, there were illustration programs.
The Venerable:
It’s a possible alternative. Yes, it would be good for you to go into architecture.
Someone passing by:
Yes, it would be good for you to go into architecture..
A lady:
Yes, it would be good for you to go into architecture.
Maxime:
Effectively I could go this way.
The Venerable:
It would be good for you. You can continue to draw during your architecture studies.
Maxime:
I’ll never give up drawing, but I don’t take it too seriously, I never thought that I would make a career of it. It’s a thing that I liked doing, and I liked seeing myself progressing, I liked looking at it, I liked sharing it. I think I was not serious about it, so that’s why I didn’t choose to study it, even though architecture is indeed quite close to it.
The Venerable:
In fact, you can be an excellent architect without knowing how to draw. Then, it’s interesting to know how to draw to communicate your ideas. You can end up drawing badly, but be good at drawing your ideas. Then, to be good at drawing can be useful in architecture.
Maxime:
Yes, I think this is going to help me, I might not be the best, but it’s a good thing that I know drawing, it will be a plus for architecture.
The Venerable:
Don’t be under any illusions: in the end, it won’t be long before you’re on the computer. and it’s no longer necessary to know how to draw.
Maxime:
Ah ?
The Venerable:
Well, there’s a way around it: At the Strasbourg INSA you can be recruited as a student after only one year in preparatory school and they have a program of studies in architecture. I have a colleague whose son is in that school, call him!
Maxime:
Bingo! I’m going to do it, if I’m accepted in that school, then I won’t have lost a year and I might be with people like me who have chosen this path.
The Venerable:
The INSA in Strasbourg was founded during the German period (1870-1918), and at that time, the Germans didn’t distinguish between engineers and architects. So, this school has a tradition of being an engineering school, but it also trains architects, and this is something that has been kept. About 50 architects graduate every year, I think there are a little less nowadays. During the first years the courses are focused on engineering, civil engineering, and then thermic engineering.
Maxime:
I have no particular desire to move in this direction.
The Venerable:
It’s an opportunity to be seized.
Maxime:
It’ll enable me to be outside the classical schools.
Maxime :
After my architecture studies at INSA, I worked in Strasbourg, I moved then to Paris where I worked for eight years. In the meantime, I had several experiences in foreign countries, I had an internship in Denmark, and one in Mexico. Then I worked for two months in Tokyo, because it was a culture I really wanted to discover, I dared to send my CV, and they told me: “Let’s do it, come if you like.” I already had maybe two or three years’ experience, so, they took me on for a two-month trial, and then there was no job available to stay. So, I came back, but it was a beautiful experience.
7. Yovan ‘s Story (continued)
Yovan:
At the beginning the connection between my brother and me was jazz. After jazz, I went a lot towards popular music, because I really enjoy composing. I’m in a rap group called Kunta, rap and Ethiopian music, with several instrumentalists. In Kunta, I play keyboard and I rap in English. In fact, I’d been doing a bit of rap on my own for a long time, and it was hard for me to imagine that you could do both playing keyboard and rap. Now I do it from time to time in certain projects, but at first, I didn’t want to mix the two, because it was a bit like two different personalities. So, I played keyboard because it was needed in the group. I simply got into playing Ethiopian scales, what you played on the piano wasn’t too complicated. Now I do both equally, keyboard and voice.
I like making different types of music, in fact I’m not locked in. I’ve already done quite a bit of music with images, notably I did music for a short film by a friend, Pierre Raphaël, and so that’s how I started. Then, I composed music for a theatre play, a modernized version of Cartouche. I’ve always been composing for a long time, doing what you might call “prod” at home on my sequencer with keyboard, plugins, it’s what my “generation” in quote does in the home studio, making the instrumentals to rap on top, but also some couplets, sometimes singing more, trying things out, in short, making music at home. That’s what we call bedroom music. I’ve always done a little of that, whether it’s rap or pop, I enjoyed experimenting because I listen to a fairly big number of different things.
Scene 1, Yovan with a stage director [8]
Stage director:
I propose you make the music for a collection of poems by Arthur Rimbaud. You could play violin.
Yovan:
I propose that it be a solo violin without effects, because I liked the idea that it be as simple as possible.
Stage director:
I insist that there be perhaps effects on certain passages where I hear different colors.
Yovan:
I’ll do what you ask me to do. I like to start with a simple idea, for example just to compose for a project, but without worrying about the live music, because if you have to do live what you composed at home, it’s always complicated, unless you compose for a group.
Stage director:
Even so, I would like you to do straight away the multi-instrument (violin and electronic effects) live on stage.
Yovan:
It stresses me a bit. No, I’d rather just play the violin. I’m going to write a piece for solo violin, without anything else, rather than to have to engage myself straight away with the Swiss knife.
Stage director:
I nevertheless need these changes of color at certain moments.
Yovan:
OK, I accept, but I’ll just take a delay and a distort, because these I know them well, they do different things and can be useful.
Yovan:
I also composed music for digital arts, for example for an artist called Minuit, Dorian Rigal [9], he makes wall projections and quite a lot of immersive things, he is invited everywhere now, in particular at the “Fêtes des Lumières” in Lyon. I’d already done illustrative music for his scenography. So, the project with the “Tale of the Common Future” is like continuing all this, to compose music with images, for a spectacle, or a show.
Scene 2, at the start of the project of the “Tale for a Common Future”. Louis and Yovan.
Louis:
Hello. Today, we start a first two-day residency to work on the music of the “Tale for a Common Future”.
Yovan:
It’s not what I’d understood since the text od the tale isn’t written down yet. I prefer to compose at home beforehand.
Louis:
No, but anyway bring something to play with.
Yovan:
Listen, if you like, but it’s not exactly what’s going to happen. I have my analogue keyboard with me. I can start to play textures. Hey, here I’ve chosen one of them, this could be a starting point for the intro.
Louis:
We’ll talk together a lot on how we’ll proceed from there.
8. Delphine’s Story (continued). Trapeze and Storytelling.
Delphine:
To make a living as a trapeze artist, the problem is hanging up a trapeze. I wanted to be autonomous, so I built a yurt (I have still it in my garden), in which I hang a trapeze. Then inside, I could give performances and lead workshops, it allowed me to have an autonomous job. I did this in the Morvan (because I was living in Morvan quite a lot), at La Tagnière in Saint-Eugène. The yurt, it’s something that can be dismantled and reassembled, I’ve never stopped dismantling and reassembling it for 4 or 5 years. I didn’t do performances with words, just with trapeze, impromptu performances with musicians I’d meet.
Scene between the Venerable Storyteller and Delphine.
The Venerable:
You hang out a lot with punks. I don’t like it.
Delphine:
I came to see your performance with them. They like it.
The Venerable:
You are in a bad way!
Delphine:
I know it’s not the kind of crowd you would approve, but I love punks, they’re my family.
The Venerable:
You hang out in bars.
Delphine:
For me there is a very strong bond there.
The Venerable:
I will never abandon you.
Delphine:
Thank you.
The Venerable:
You should become a storyteller and tell the stories related to your African trip.
Delphine:
I am incapable of telling what I lived through.
The Venerable:
I propose to you to take part to the Contes Givrés Festival [10] under the yurt.
Delphine:
I am not at all ready to talk in front of people. I could maybe do a performance without words.
Delphine:
It was my first performance for the Contes Givrés, it was called “Liberté”. It was a 20-minute performance on a trapeze with a guitar, under the yurt. For the first time it was really a spectacle that we’d designed, sold and performed. And that’s something that has been touring quite a lot at festivals. This brought me closer to Marie-France Marbach, so, I came back around here, I put up the yurt at la Fabrique, a place of residencies for creation in Savigny-sur-Grosne, in Messeugne. I found Marie-France there, and I lived at Pauline’s, who works with Contes Givrés. As she was going on a world tour, to spend a year in Asia, and she left me her flat, because I had nothing, I settled in there.
9. Louis and Maxime’s Stories (continued)
Scene between Maxime and Louis. Architecture and scenography, architecture and drawing.
Maxime:
I never gave up drawing because as I progressed, even when I was working as an employee in an architecture firm, I found that projects took a long time, so you do some drawing, at the beginning you present sketches, 3D images, drawings, lots of elements like that, very beautiful that make you want to get at a result. So, this part is super, but then, for myself, I want to arrive more quickly at a result, I don’t want to make only beautiful images. And to get to a result, it takes a long time, and there are really too many obstacles that can make you fall into something different from what you want to do.
Louis:
For me, it was important to be my own boss, so, I said to myself that scenography for events was more indicated than working for an architect’s office, because to be one’s own boss as an architect implies lots of problems, the décennale [11], and above all I was facing the temporal unfolding of a single project which in architecture can easily take ten years. This was more what I had in mind in terms of temporality, even though now it’s really a little more than that.
Maxime:
I still like architecture, so I continue practicing this way, because it takes two years to realize a project, and then it’s very gratifying to go there, to make it alive and all that, but I needed to create things over a much shorter period of time.
Louis:
With scenography for events, I was a self-employed entrepreneur, small task person in event organizing firms. Two years later, I started to be stage manager for the Ensemble Aleph [12] and other organizations. I also discovered video projection and mapping. It appealed to me a lot and I started to do that. Then, the fact of meeting people involved in video-projection led me towards digital arts and led me specifically to the tours guided by smartphones. You have in your pocket a fairly powerful tool, which people use to do very little. I thought that it could be interesting to see what could be done with this.
Maxime:
I remember that during the evenings at home, on weekends, I was spending two hours to make at least one drawing that would make me happy. And my little ritual was: I would do it in the evening, and in the next morning I would put it on the floor near the window, and it was then that I had the validation, it was then that I would know if it was successful or not. So, I would get up the next morning and say to myself: “Ah! frankly not bad.” Or “No, no, I didn’t go through with it.” Or else “OK, it’s not as it should be, but on the other hand, the next time I’ll change the color, I’ll do it again differently.” And this was the big difference with architecture where in the end, if you do many tests, you never consider the final result. You work by approximation of the result and once it’s there, frankly, it’s too late. You can no longer break the walls, you can repaint things very little, so it’s pretty frustrating because you say to yourself that you were close, but that you could have changed this or that if you would have been aware of it beforehand. However, there, with drawing at home, what I like is that you are like the chefs: they have a dish, and if they want to change a flavor, an ingredient, they start the dish again and they come up with a result again. I like the fact that in my everyday life I can do the two activities, the very long work in architecture to achieve a result, and the fairly short work time an artist needs to achieve a result that itself leads to the following search.
Louis:
The first encounter with mapping [13], came through YouTube, with a collective called 1024 Architecture. They are behind one of the software programs called MadMapper. I discovered mapping at a Christmas tree gathering, they had basically stretched some tulle fabric on tour Layher, some construction site scaffolding. It’s amazing what you can do with just tulle fabric and video projection. In fact, what really appealed to me about mapping in the first place, it was its holograph, hologram, holographic aspect. It would take form somehow, and as such it spoke to me well with my architecture background, and the fact that it was contextual.
Yovan’s Story (continued), the Project « A Violin for my School ».
I’m currently teaching two days a week for a project called “A violin for my school”. Basically, it’s a social project that aims at reducing school failure through music learning, they called in neurosciences researchers to conduct a 10-year study to see how students behave. It’s an interesting project that concerns students up to age 16 taking violin lessons, sponsored by a Swiss foundation, the Fondation Vareille. In this program, there are a lot of teachers, but certainly not enough, otherwise it’s very good, the students like making music, the violin, they only play violin. The foundation bought a lot of violins for all the students. It’s good for the students do this, they are all in ZEP+ [Priority Education Zone+], which means that certain of them have complicated profiles.
11. Delphine, the Tale of the Skull and the Fisherman..
Delphine:
The first story I told was one I heard from Marie-France and loved. It’s the story of the skull and the fisherman:
The Tale of the Skull and the Fisherman
A fisherman finds a skull there.
Fisherman: Skull, what are you doing here? What brought you here?
Skull: The word.
The fisherman is very astonished that the skull speaks.
Fisherman: Skull, you have spoken, what brought you here?
The skull unlocks his big jaw:
Skull: The word.
The fisherman runs to the king.
Fisherman: Wow! there is a skull speaking over there.
The King: Wait a minute, you’re bothering me with your stories of a skull speaking there, do you think I‘ll believe you? It’s not possible. Anyway, I’ll come, but if it’s not true, I’ll chop your head off.
The fisherman, he is sure of himself, he takes the king, the ministers, everyone.
Fisherman: Skull, skull! Tell the king what brought you here?
Skull: …
Fisherman: Come on skull, please speak, what brought you here?
Skull: …
So, the king chops the fisherman’s head off, the head falls on the floor, it rolls and rolls, and rolls, it comes right next to the skull.
Skull: Head, hey, head! what brought you here?
Head: The word.
Delphine:
And I liked this story because precisely of this fear of speaking: what is speaking? What should be said? What shouldn’t be said? Do you have the right to say anything? Are you going to have your head chopped off if you say something that you shouldn’t? Perhaps it was my fear of speaking that made me to tell that story, it was one of the first ones I used. And then, after that, what tales did I tell? I found stories, I looked for them in books, my bookshelves are full of books, I read, read, read, a lot of stories. And then, I chose the ones that touched me.
12. The little notebook with trees. Maxime Hurdequint,
Maxime Touroute [14] and Louis Clément.
Scene 1: All three of them drink coffee at Louis’ home.
Maxime T. :
I am a computer expert and I do also artistic photography projects. Here are several ones of them. And some software I have encoded.
Maxime H. :
Ah!
Louis :
Ah!… I am interested in mapping. I do it on masks. I build African mask out of papers, fairly simple things, which I then map with a video projector, adding colors.
Maxime T. :
Ah!
Maxime H. :
Ah!… Here are my drawings.
Louis :
Ah!
Maxime T. :
Ah! OK, super, but we don’t know what we could do with them.
Louis :
Why not tell a story?
Maxime T. :
Yeah…
Maxime H. :
Yeah…
Louis :
No, it won’t do.
Maxime H. :
I’ve also this, that’s cool and funny..
(He takes out a small notebook measuring 10 cm by 10 cm)
In this little notebook, I asked people to draw a tree.
Scene 2, sometimes before, Maxime H. and another person.
Maxime H.:
Draw me a tree on this notebook.
The other person:
Hell no, I don’t know how to draw and all that, and then, frankly, a tree, no, that’s not possible.
Maxime H.:
Surely you can do it, and then, if it’s ugly, in any case it will remain anonymous. As soon as you’ve finished your tree, you can look at all the other trees that have been drawn before, frankly, there are some cool ones.
The other person:
OK, I’ll draw a tree.
Maxime H.:
I find it funny to see the richness of the different trees.
Scene 3: During Maxime’s architectural studies.
Maxime H.:
Here we are, guys, I’ll ask you to draw a tree, and then we will hang all your drawings on the class wall with a little text I’ve written on the meaning of drawing trees.
Each student draws his/her tree.
Maxime H.:
Now look at them and you can find out what you’re like, knowing that it’s not serious.
Une étudiante :
What should we look for?
Maxime H.:
If there are roots going into the ground, if there are leaves or not (because many people draw trees without leaves), if the branches are going down, if the trunk is thin, if there is a hole in the trunk – it’s a great classic – and finally, there are absurd things : if there is a bird on the left branch, but looks to the right, that means something. But it’s impossible, it would never happen,
A student:
But it’s exactly what I’ve drawn, this thing! [General laughter]
Scene 4: in 2015.
A Japanese friend:
Here is a present for you: a little notebook.
Maxime H.:
Thank you. I don’t ‘know what I am going to do with this notebook. The notebook I had before was nearly full when I lost it in the Paris metro. I’m going to do it again with this new notebook. I tried to do it with other things, like doing it with fishes, anyone can draw a fish, but the results were not very interesting. Someone suggested to draw a teapot, or a window, I tried but frankly, I never came up with anything other than a tree. Yes, it’s true, the fishes are less interesting!
Scene 5: return to the first scene with Louis Clément, Maxime H. et Maxime T.
Maxime H.:
It clicks!
Louis:
It’s great, we could do that, but we could get people to draw the tree on their smartphone with their fingers, and then we’d send it, and you could do an arboretum, where everybody can see everyone else’s trees.
Maxime T.:
We will call it the Live Drawing Project.
13. Delphine’s story (continued). The Tale of Tom Thumb.
Delphine:
A friend of mine, Florent Fichot, who is an actor, suggested to me that I do something where I would tell things on the trapeze, and so, I was reciting some passages, from Peter Pan for example; it was called “Souffle court” (short breath). We played it at the Théâtre du C2 [15] (in Torcy, in Saône-et-Loire).
Then, there was the story of Tom Thumb on the trapeze. Not the story of the real Tom Thumb, right? But Jacques Prévert’s “Petit Poucet” (“The Ostrich”) [16].
The Tale of Tom Thumb
When Tom Thumb, abandoned in the forest, sowed pebbles behind him to find his way home, he had no idea that an ostrich was following him to eat all the pebbles one by one, “ram, ram, ram”. Tom Thumb looks back, no more pebbles! It’s a sorry state, no pebbles no house; no house no returning home; no home no daddy-mummy. Then he hears a noise, he hears music, a racket. He pokes his head through the leaves, and he sees the ostrich dancing and singing, and she looks at him.
Ostrich: It’s me who make all this noise, I’m happy, I’ve eaten…
Tom Thumb: You have a magnificent stomach.
Ostrich: Yes, I ate lots of stuff. Come on! Get on my back, I go very fast, I’m going to take you far away.
Tom Thumb: But my mother and my father, won’t I ever see them again?
Ostrich: Did your mother beat you sometimes?
Tom Thumb: My father used to beat me too.
Ostrich: Ah! he used to beat you! Wait a minute! Kids don’t beat their parents, why should parents beat their kids? I can’t stand violence against children. Did he ever beat you?
Tom Thumb: Yes, Father Thumb also beat me.
Ostrich: You know what? Father Thumb is no good. And your mother, instead of buying big hats with ostrich feathers, she’d better be taking care of you. And your father, he is not very smart, do you know what he said to your mother the first time he saw her? He said: ‘she looks like a big pond, it’s a shame there is no bridge.’ Everybody laughed!
Tom Thumb: I laughed, but my mother slapped my face: ‘you can’t laugh when your father says that’.
Ostrich: The thing, boo!!
Delphine:
At this point, I fell off the trapeze and broke my hand.
I think that I was taken by emotion looking at the audience. I fell off the trapeze and broke my hand, as a result I couldn’t speak anymore. The problem with working the trapeze, and telling a story at the same time, is that you have to be there with each part of the body, in the hands, in the legs, with each support point, you have to be concentrated. Except that I was telling a story at the same time, I lost focus and I fell.
14. Delphine and Storytelling. Maxime, Architecture and Drawings. Yovan and Composition.
Delphine:
My wrist was broken, I was operated on in Montceau, and they failed – you should never go to Montceau, you’ll know now – they failed me, I had to have another operation, so that lasted a year. As a result, I’d to earn a living.
Scene: Telephone call with the Venerable stroryteller:
The Venerable:
What do you intend to do?
Delphine:
I’m banking on storytelling. I’m going to tell stories, I’m capable of it, since I did it on the trapeze..
The Venerable:
You know, it’s a sign, if these things happen to you, it might be because you have got something else to do besides trapeze.
Maxime:
Visual arts are hyper wide in range. I don’t know if it’s a rule I’ve set up for myself, but I hadn’t explore that much outside drawing, so some of my friends told me: “Well, try to open up your practice a little.” I think it was good for me to gain confidence little by little with small formats, and gradually, I’ve become more at ease with large formats. As I’ve been doing a lot of skateboarding, and my brother makes skate art, he sculpts on skateboards, he introduced me to that, so, I did some skateboard art, I must have produced about ten of them, and then, recently, I was commissioned to do one on a big surfboard. I think it’s a question of feeling at ease, and after that, you can move on to bigger formats. What’s also amazing about skateboards is having the object in your hands, and being obliged to move with it, to move around it, whereas with the sheet of paper, it’s really only the wrist that’s moving. Here, there’s a relationship with the object, even if you’re not producing the form… I’m discovering all this gradually, bit by bit, as I become more comfortable with my artistic or illustrative approach.
Yovan:
When I compose, I often use a sound that develops in a given time. Sometimes I have to stretch it out a bit, make things longer, and sometimes a bit shorter, that’s why the repetitive side is convenient, and it’s also what you want, an electronic dimension. Normally, when I compose pieces, I have a beginning and an ending, I know where I’m going, and I like to have a little constraint especially for the music I compose for other’s projects or collaborative projects.
Delphine:
So, gently, I started telling stories and, in so doing, also becoming more self-confident. I think that you are completely naked when telling a story: slips of the tongue, tone of voice, all this tells things about yourself. I felt that it was for me a very delicate issue: being in front of an audience, being afraid of their judgment, of judging yourself. I’m very demanding, I’m very critical of myself, so I was very afraid of what I was going to experience with myself. Speaking in front of others, you’re committing yourself, committing a part yourself. I find that very risky, in fact.
Yovan:
And among the sources that have influenced me, there is a musician, actually not quite a DJ, called Débruit [17], who in particular did a project – KoKoKo! [18] – with percussionists from Kinshasa. It’s really interesting, precisely because he respects their work, he uses their music and just adds small electro touches, but doesn’t deform their music. What Débruit does inspired me well before that KoKoKo! project, but it is one of his most accomplished projects, because it really respects traditional music, and then goes for electronic touches to modernize it a bit.
Delphine:
With the trapeze, I gesticulate a lot, and as time goes by less and less, but it’s true that I move a lot, I engage my body a lot, and I work a lot with a double, often a musician. At the start, the guitarist Julien Lagrange [19] was the guy with whom I formed a trapeze-guitar duo, and he’s still participating in tale-guitar performances. That helps me a lot because we work things together, we set-up rhythm, it pushes me to work too, because when you are alone in your kitchen, you do it, but it’s less easy than when you meet someone to work with, so it helps me to be two. Often, after working on the stories with Julien, I also do them without the guitar. It’s reassuring not to be on my own, and that’s how you build things up.
Maxime:
My main activity is as an architect, but I don’t consider that drawing is just a hobby. There are times during the week which are reserved for drawing, so these two activities coexist. One is more important than the other, but as I’ve participated in exhibitions and I sometimes had commissions, I’ve also been able to sell certain works. Of course, the artistic part of my life is not the one that feeds me, but at the same time, I’ve been able to go further with it. I began by having an exhibition in a café in 2020, where I showed several drawings I’d made during and after my trip to Asia. I also made some drawings on skateboards, I’d done one tryptic and one diptych of skateboards, again in that style. In 2021, I’d an exhibition in a restaurant shared with another artist, I used the theme of the Mayas, because I’d been to Mexico. I had done for this exhibition a triptych of 3 skateboards, and a diptych of 2 skateboards with another artist working in a completely different universe. The same year I participated in a skate art exhibition in Roubaix, I sent in a diptych on the theme of Japan, some people got interested and bought it. It was very funny: a lady offered it to her husband, a former skateboarder and she said: “He is a fan of Japan, he loves skateboarding, I felt it was his style. We’ve put it in good place in our living room.” I was delighted.
Delphine:
I turned primarily to young audiences, I thought it was less judgmental. In a way, it’s harder, because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, that is they’re not going to pretend that it’s good. There is something about children, where if it doesn’t work, you know it straight away, there’s no two ways about it. And at the same time, there’s less judgment in relation to references, to labels, to what already exists.
Maxime :
Then we did a group exhibition in 2022 with my brother and another artist, where this time it was only skateboards that we sculpted. We decided that for each of us, there would be one skateboard we would do entirely ourselves, another that we would share with one of the other two artists, and the third would be shared with the other artist.
Yovan :
I work with Cubase. It’s not obvious, people don’t understand why. Everyone’s on Live. When I am on my computer, I don’t use Live often, in fact I never use it. It was always a bit of a struggle to say: “Well, I am on Cubase”. And during the first residency we had in Lyon, the sound engineer told me: “Ah! but I’m working on Live, you have to learn Live”, and finally he was a bit at a loss and so was I. We found a common ground and he saw that I had the latest Cubase version with the same functionalities, he understood quickly, and he showed me how to adapt the pieces in 7.1 [20] for a spatialization. I’d never done that, it stressed me a bit at first, so I said: “Well, that was an interesting thing to do.”
Delphine:
You have to be very demanding about what is told and by whom: if you tell a story that has been already told by such-and-such a person, or that comes from such-and-such a place, it might be poorly seen. For example, to tell a story that has been written by Henri Gougaud, because he’s a guy who takes up traditional tales, and puts them in his own name, you can’t do that. Or take up a story told someone else, you can’t copy-and-paste. You have to be careful with what you do, in fact, you can’t tell just anything. You have to respect everyone’s work, always say what’s the origin of your stories, from where it comes, from what country, from what culture. And as with any work, I think that as soon as you put your foot in it, the more you realize that there is work to do, it’s without end.
Maxime:
And last year (2022) we had a collective exhibition of surfboards at the Lyon City Surf Park near the Décines football ground. It was the opening vernissage of this sports facility, and they had asked 20 artists to draw on surfboards. I produced this work on Moroccan theme, because it’s quite well-known in the world of surf, I was inspired by Moroccan arts and I added the sea at the end.
Delphine:
When I speak of rhythm, it’s the rhythm of narration. Because often, there are moments when it’s almost singing, there are refrains that are repeated, and an ending. It has to grow in intensity, it has to decrease. There’s a real rhythm to the creation of a story. What is hard with the “Tale for a Common Future” is that it’s a very long story, so it’s more difficult to get into a rhythm.
15. The Live Drawing Project
Louis:
And then, I switched to video projection, and I started to design this first project that worked correctly, it was the “Live Drawing Project”, which was clearly the result of a meeting with Maxime Touroute, Maxime Hurdequin, and me. I met Maxime Touroute at a mapping workshop, he had just arrived in Lyon, and each one of us had in turn to present ourselves, and he said that he was working as a developer for Millumin. Maxime Hurdequin is my cousin, so, we’ve known each other since early childhood.
Maxime:
With the three of us, we organized a lot of working time together. At many times, even though we were working side by side, each one of us would work on our own. But there wasn’t this feeling of distance between us. With the Live Drawing Project, the heart of the matter remained the computer, it was really Maxime Touroute who coded, and then there were a lot of tasks that came into play: the communication part, the project management, preparation, set-up.
Louis:
In fact, there are three software programs that exist to do « mapping » and work very well, Resolume that I use, Madmapper which was designed by Swiss people and well known in the trade, and Millumin that tried to find a place in the performing arts.
Maxime:
It will be quite different with the “Tale of the Common Future” where the branches join together at the end during the residencies, and the rest of the time there is not much need to communicate with each other.
Louis:
And we thought that it might be to have people draw in order for their drawings to appear on a screen in real time.
Maxime:
For the Live Drawing you need to know what you are capable of doing and whether you can really encode as you go. OK, there, Louis, do you think that we will get there doing this on this interface?
Louis:
Well, no, it’s impossible, we cannot do it.
Maxime:
Hop !
So, you must have a lot more exchanges, because, the skills are much more linked together, it’s a constant ping-pong.
Louis:
And one month later we participated to the “Fête des Lumières” in Lyon.
Maxime:
During the “Fêtes des Lumières” in Lyon, it was in a bar, the Club des Lumières. The bar tender had stated: “I’ll give you 150 bucks for three days and you make me an event ‘Fêtes des Lumières’.” So we showed him our idea, I had made three drawings to explain it, and Maxime Touroute, did the coding every night for ten days, and it works very well. And what’s more, people would have enough to do, and only make one or two drawings and that’s it. We thought that when we proposed a little theme, draw a flower, draw a tree, we thought that people will have their own task at hand, and only make a small drawing, and that’s it. In fact, not at all, people get really interested, they stay for an hour drawing next to each other, saying: “Look at mine, look at mine!” And in the end, we realize that the more drawing themes we gave, the more people ideas people had, or they wouldn’t follow the proposed theme at all. I think we had found a really open tool. It’s true, we can’t deny this, that people had the tendency to look at their own phones in an individualist way, but because they were drawing right next to one another, they were also exchanging words with one another. And then there were those who didn’t draw, they looked at the big screen where the drawings were projected. We realize that when we passed between the people, things happened, people chatted, they showed each other things, it gave them ideas. We thought: “Yeah, that’s cool, we have got something there that’s rich”. That’s what we developed with Maxime Touroute and Louis, this tool, the Live Drawing Project, a project of participatory drawings that we enriched as we went along.
Louis:
And after that, it got rolling, we are now at our 140th projection.
Maxime:
With the Live Drawing project, when we use it, it’s really a big remote control. Maxime Touroute provided lots of keys: there is a key to change the color of the drawings, one to make them bigger, one to make them smaller, etc. And you can make crossfades, and things like that, but we are not really telling a story; we simply animate the images to avoid always having the same visuals, but it’s not narrative. By contrast, the “Tale of the Common Future”, with the Resolute software, and the fact that there is a storyteller, is really very narrative.
Louis:
We have been touring about everywhere in the world, it has worked super well.
Maxime:
This has been going on since 2018 until now. We had other gigs in 2019 and 2020. It became gradually better remunerated; we were able to buy a video projector, get an association to take care of the administrative side. So, little by little we became more professional. We travelled to Canada, to Denmark. Then there was the Covid confinement, so we developed tools specially for the confinement, by organizing remote communication events. This was for us a good source of revenue, we did it again with Denmark, this time in tele-conference. We are present in many countries, lately in Burma for example.
Louis:
And I told myself at some point that I would like to tell stories with this interface, to be able to do something participatory, and also tell a story so that the spectator would play an active role in shaping the narrative. As it happened, we did our first residency four years ago at LabLab in Villeurbanne [21] (a suburb of Lyon). That’s when we started to use this tool to tell a very short story: the coming to life of a digital anomaly. It was a very short 15 minutes tale, maybe even shorter. It took us four or five days to put it together. At that time, there was no tale yet. There was just a text projected on the screen, as with subtitles for a moving image. The public would draw things before entering the performance space, for example stars. In fact, what we wanted to test was the different types of interaction with the public, how we could get them to participate beforehand, during the projection, while looking, how to make them stop, etc. This residency helped me a lot afterwards in writing, and particularly interacting with the public. Maxime Hurdequint participated in the creation of the basic concept and after that he was doing the management of the project, publicity, looking for places to do it, he did quite a number of budgets templates, when we had to get people to sign, etc.
16. Delphine: Two Tales.
Delphine:
With Julien, now, we present the tale of “Peter and the Witch”, it’s a traditional children’s story. I mention this one because it’s very rhythmic, between what I say and what he plays.
The Tale of Peter and the Witch
In a village, there is a witch.
(Julien plays, he doesn’t look at me, he listens to what I say, and he plays accordingly.)
Then all of a sudden, the witch starts to sing to Pierre, a small boy: [she sings]
“Crac, it’s me the most cunning, and cric, crac, I’m going to eat you up, ah! ah! ah! ah! ah!”
(Julien plays as soon as she sings, he finds the melody to accompany her.))
Hop !
She puts him in the bag.
Hop ! She closes the bag, ah! ah! ah! ah!
She walks, she goes up the path, she arrives to her manor, she puts the bag in the kitchen, she opens it. In fact, what’s inside?
Well, the kid escaped, and then put a stone in the bag, aaaaaaaaaah!”
(When the witch opens the bag, Julien stops playing, there should be a silence at that moment)
She opens it and what’s there inside?
« Aaaah aah ! »
A stone.
« You little brat!”
(This must be in silence. Then the guitar starts again on:)
Peter, the next morning, he doesn’t go to school, he goes on the path, he finds a pear… Hop! He wanders about.
(Julien plays according to what the storyteller is saying, for him there is a logic at work.)
There is also the Tale of the Gingerbread Man
It’s the story of a gingerbread man made by a woman, she puts him in the oven, and he escapes through the window, runs away, runs, runs, and everybody is running after him, and he runs, runs, runs. And the fox, he is waiting for him at the other end, he entices him with big praises, so evidently, he trusts the fox. He gets on his back, and the fox, “crrrr”, eats him. (At this moment, we have to be together, when he devours him.) “Crrrr, hop!… He’s eaten him!!
Delphine:
So, Julien and me, we have some very well synchronized cues between us. He performs very near me, we know each other very well, he knows how I tell the story, so, we can improvise things together. We work a lot together face-to-face, even though we also do a lot of work on our own. I can give him the story that I want to tell on paper, or in a book. He brings his own stories too, and he says: “Ah! I’d like to hear that story, I think it’s cool, and plus I’ve got a musical universe for it”. I work a bit on my own, and he work a bit on his own, about roughly what we want to do. And then, we work on getting things in place. And we say: “Let’s do it!”
17. Origin of the “Tale of a Common Future”.
Scene 1: The telephone rings at Delphine’s home. It’s Louis Clément
Louis:
My name is Louis Clément. The association Antipode gave me your name. I would like to do a spectacle in which you imagine how it would be in 100 years, but in an ideal world.
Delphine:
Ah yes! No doubt about it, we are in this ideal world…
Louis:
100 years from now, it’s been done!
Delphine:
OK, and how did we get here?
Louis:
I often tell stories, I’ve got the knack for it, I’ve done it with lots of students, because I participate a lot in artistic and cultural education residencies, and what I often talk about is trying to change the world on my own scale: again, it’s utopic on my part, but then it’s something which carries me along. How can I change the world? I can’t invent very cheap renewable energies, I can’t invent a totally carbon-free means of transport of the future, as for example the cargo-bike. So, I thought that I would just like to get people to reflect on their future and above all to try to go in the opposite direction to everything that’s a dystopia, to try to start with something where, basically, you think about a future in which everything goes well, and how is it possible to achieve this..
Delphine:
What you say does me good. Because at the moment I’m in the dark, immersed in punks’ stuff, in things where the world is… Sometimes I think I’m going to throw a bomb on this world, I mean, we’re going to blow up things, when you realize what’s happening in the world, it’s just “aaaah!…” Sometimes, it seems that there are people to kill, there are things to blast, anyway it’s got to stop, period. I hang out with the world of punks, no future.
Louis :
Through my reading, I got a lot of inspiration from stories telling us that basically it’s thanks to thinking that you achieve to do things. In particular Neal Stephenson, who is science-fiction author I quite like, who developed a theory called hieroglyph theory: it has to do with technological innovations, and thanks to science-fiction you are able to make major technological advances. His favorite example is the fuel for rockets, he explains that it’s a science-fiction novelist who said that it would work in such and such a way, and then afterwards, a researcher started to work on this idea using this writer’s intuitions and succeeded in creating the first rocket fuel. I like to tell this story to the students I work with or to the public, I like to stress the fact that, basically, if you want to move towards a desirable future, you need to think about it first. So, the first stage to having a world you want is just to reflect on it.
Delphine:
In fact, it’s cool to imagine this, it counterbalances the dark ideas. OK say that in 100 years we will be in an ideal world, and you do everything possible to get there. It’s not a question of criticizing everything that’s wrong, of pointing the finger at what doesn’t work, even though you know so many things that are wrong. No, we’re going to say, OK, in 100 years’ time we’re in a cool place. So, OK. I don’t know what I’m getting myself into. Well, yes, I’m interested.
Louis:
Well, you’re interested, go on, let’s do it..
Delphine:
But you don’t want to see what I am doing beforehand? I play at the media library in Mâcon, on such a date, for children and in the evening for the general public.
Louis:
Ah! I cannot in the evening, I will come at the performance for the kids.
Delphine:
So, Louis came to see my Jabuti performance at the Mâcon multimedia library: a trapeze performance, actually. We put the trapeze back on, because I’ve got a friend who is also trapezist. I’ve got a circus network around me. Jabuti was a spectacle of storytelling-trapeze-flute. It was a stroll: we went strolling with the public around the media library and led them to the trapeze. So, he came to see the performance, and that’s how we met for the first time.
Louis:
So, that’s how we crossed paths. Anyway, I arrived a little early before the performance, we had a chat, I explained the project, how it will happen, etc. After that, she presented her project, I had to go back to Lyon before the end of the performance, so I didn’t have time to debrief at the end.
Scene 2: New telephone call from Louis to Delphine.
Louis: Hello, hi..
Delphine: Hi.
Louis:
I saw your performance, which I thought was very good. So yes, it’s fine with me, if you are still willing to do it, OK, let’s do it.
Delphine: OK, let’s do it.
Louis : Let’s go.
18. The AADN Immersive Project
The project of the Tale for a Common Future was initiated by Louis. It was his first real spectacle, he had at first few ideas that were still brewing, he knew what he wanted to do but he had difficulties putting his ideas into concrete form. So, when we started talking about it, he had in mind a first team and above all he was looking for funding, in any case, so that we could get places to enable us to create the immersive aspect of the spectacle. A first proposal was put forward, it came close, but it didn’t work. Then, once we got the funding from AADN for this immersive project in planetariums, let’s say in certain towns in France, we started to talk about writing the spectacle, because it was about one year before the first performance.
Maxime:
It started that way. Louis had the intuition to bring us together. In 2019, we organized a residency to try to tell a story using Live Drawing. We made a 5-minute piece, with very, very simple graphics, frankly, it was great. Telling stories became a possibility, but at this point we didn’t go any further. It gradually germinated along the way.
Louis :
And then there was the call for proposals by AADN (Arts & Cultures Numériques) [22] – I was a benevolent member of its Executive Board. They launched a call for immersive creation. It interested me a lot because I started going to see immersive full dome spectacles, and I thought it was pretty crazy, well, it was rather amazing! The immersion that was felt in front of these images aroused my interest. The AADN point of view was to bet on collective immersion, that is to get many spectators to participate in an experience, rather than to have an individual immersion as in virtual reality (with headsets). I liked the idea of going against individual forms of immersion. We’re talking today of the « Metaverse » [23] it means that it’s either about immersing yourself individually in a collective thing or it’s about collectively immersing yourself in a work: you’re all together.
Maxime:
So, it’s Louis who really comes up with the concept, he knows already what he wants to do, and who he wants to work with. We found a first storyteller, but in the end, we didn’t necessarily get the grants we wanted, so we ended up finding a second storyteller, Delphine, and Louis had already found Yovan for the music, who he knew very well. And we got the immersive grant in 2021.
Louis :
We answered the AADN call for projects, I don’t remember the exact date. I took a certain number of decisions: I started by telling this story, I came up with the name of “A Tale of a Common Future”, in retrospect, I think that it speaks to a lot of people. After a first refusal to our proposal for the AADN Call for immersive projects, we resubmitted a project. And this time we got it and the AADN agreed to take us on as a delegated production, which meant that they’d help us raise money and to get performances. And from that moment we have to produce written proposals and start the residencies. I’d been working with Maxime Hurdequint with the Live Drawing, we couldn’t do without his drawing skills, I asked him to make the sets. I thought that a musician was needed, so obviously I asked Yovan Girard, whom I admire a lot, he made a lot of music with a sensibility that I like. He usually composes strictly musical pieces, but he had already done a theater piece with someone. I know he can do it too. We’ve known each other since early childhood, my parents and his parents are very close friends, my mother and his father went to high school together, I think.
19. The “Tale of a Common Future”.
Louis :
So, I set up a calendar for creative actions, we decide on dates, we start doing things together, etc. I continue in parallel to seek more fundings on my own. While this Call to immersive projects grant brings us some money, it’s not enough to pay everybody all the time, and what’s more, I ask people to work outside the residency periods. We’ve submitted I don’t know how many applications to various organizations. For example, we submitted three times a proposal to the Hybrid Creation in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes before getting something from them, and also we applied to the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma) and we were successful, as a result we obtained a substantial amount of money. Thanks to that I can breathe a little easier, because I’ll be able to pay people properly for their creation, this is for us a great chance.. And then, we also got some funding from SACEM (music author’s right society). And we were able to do another residency, at the LabLab, and to pay the Enghien-les-Bains Centre des Arts residency, that was not otherwise renumerated. This residency lasted two weeks, because the place by chance was available. They would provide the place, but that’s all, they didn’t do any co-production, they didn’t give us any money for that.
Before finding the title of the “Tale of a Common Future” (Conte d’un futur commun), I was thinking that the reactions of the public should be able to inflect the story’s unfolding. If it was written, we would have arborescent scenarios, with multiple choice trees, this was going to be potentially very complex. And then, there was that idea of a story told around a fire, with people participating, that kind of thing. What pleased me was the opposition between the tale as one of the oldest forms of “art” with its manner of telling stories, and the participatory side, the smartphones, the projection, you had to find a balance between the two. So, I decided that it could be a tale.
Delphine, Maxime, Yovan and I started to work together on this project. I really had already the whole universe of the tale in my head. The first time Delphine and I met, I had the whole unfolding of the story. I knew where it starts, what you are going to see, and how it all ends. In fact, I didn’t really know the storyline, but the places where it happens.
20. Louis, one year to reflect.
Louis :
For a year, practically nothing happened, there were no meetings or anything else. I was thinking on my own, in a rather introspective way. Nothing specific was emerging, but I read an enormous number of books, no longer just for “pleasure”. I made a huge list of works to read. These are all references to concepts, people, thinkers, projects that inspire me, from people who would talk about how they were writing about this topic.
During this year of thinking about the project, when decisions had to be made, it was all in my head, at no time had I written down anything. I formalize things in my head, I just say to myself: this is going to be like that, we’ll start there. And then there was this idea of going to visit places where there are communities living in harmony with their environment, and that, in fact, cannot be done in a hurry: one would do a complete tour of the environment, in the forest, the mountain, through the airs, under the water… And then, I thought, on account of their importance, the city should be a big thing, which will not disappear, so we needed to find an interesting way to inhabit this town. I read a lot of stuff on re-wilding in fashion, like Baptiste Morizot [24], all those people speaking about how to give back a place to nature in the city.
21. The writing of the Tale. Louis and Delphine.
Louis :
With Delphine, we meet a first time for two days. At the beginning, I come with my story, but in fact I really have only the places of action, and Delphine is the one who’s going to knit everything together, the relationships between the characters, how they are going to be, how they’ll talk to each other, and that helps me a lot. I present my ideas to her and how they might be developed: I want the heroine to go there, and there, and there…
Delphine:
I draw, I write, and then, on my own I go over it again, I reimagine what it looks like, and I find a way to say it. And then, when I’ve found it, I can fix it on paper, and I put the texts on my computer. But after that, I keep modifying them a lot. That’s why I have lots and lots of texts on my computer. When I am working in the residencies, I need to have written papers that I cross out, that I correct directly, you see, for example here, it’s all corrected. I am lost if it’s too much a shambles. It also has to be clear in my head, that’s why I write a lot of texts. Writing the tale starts always with paper, because I’m in the habit of writing by hand. Louis is on the sofa and says to me: “OK.”
Scene 1: the first working session between Delphine and Louis.
Louis:
OK. Let’s start with the arboreals.
Delphine:
We need a heroine.
Louis:
There’s the question of whether it should be a girl or a guy.
Delphine:
Neither, as far as I’m concerned.
Louis:
Should we use the principle of saying “iel” [he and she at the same time in French.]
Delphine:
For me, it’s a little complicated to put in place, because of the conjugations behind it and the understanding by the audience is a bit tricky. I read books which use “iel”, which means “he and she”, in order to avoid having a feminine or masculine character. Many feminists use this formulation. It’s complicated when you have a public that doesn’t know, children, for example, you say “iel” and they are not going to understand.
Louis:
We can decide that it will be a girl.
Delphine:
Yes, but with a name that can be applied to both genders. Instead of using he and she in the text, you could use the first name of the person.
Louis:
I propose Camille. [25]
Delphine:
I agree.
Louis:
I’ve got all the places we’re going to visit: arboreal, after that the city, after that the coral, … I’d like Camille to go over there, over there, and over there and I don’t know where Camille’s going to go in the end.
Delphine:
We could add the idea of « magnets » (compasses) that people go to see to determine who are the ones who heal. And also, prairies, plants, and it could end up underwater.
Louis:
There’s this idea of the Great Council that’s probably located in the city
Delphine:
I’m noting everything you say spontaneously on paper and keeping it in a file. I keep everything in bulk, even the things we’re going to reject in the show. This is the pile of the entire « Tale of a Common Future ». You see, it’s a mess! Some of the sentences are very clear, I write them down because they seem right to me, I sometimes found them orally.
Louis:
I describe where it will take place, what we want to happen, where it’s going, and what can be found each time, and you, you’ll transform it all into a story. It’s you who will write the text, the major part of the story.
Delphine:
I note : “Forest, going through the forest. The train station. The village. The city. The grassland.” I propose to have the grassland before the sea. And then, at the end, that Camille doesn’t return home. We have to find something that involves the audience, that make them evolve throughout the performance, so that they come away from it as though they’d been on a journey. I want people to come away shaken up, that they could say “we went on a journey to a world unknown to us”, a world that brought back some memories, that made us ask questions about ourselves.
Louis:
What I like is this idea of an initiation rite, it’s an initiation journey.
Delphine:
You see that I’ve even annotated the body positions: am I facing the public? Do I turn around? We can also work on the stage directions, it’s also an important dimension.
Scene 2: the same, a little later.
Delphine:
In this scene, Camille goes down into the submarine city.
Louis:
Yeah, you see, we could have bubbles floating outside and then there could be cables falling into the water.
Delphine:
I’m drawing it.
Scene 3: the same, biocracy.
Louis:
Concerning climate control, it’s the idea of piercing the clouds to make them rain.
Delphine:
You see, “technological solutionism”, I know I have to put it somewhere, but I don’t know where. They are like that: biocracy.
Louis:
Somebody who really inspired me about biocracy was Camille de Toledo [26]. I went to one of his lectures, “The Witnesses of the Future” as part of the European Lab. In fact, what I really liked in this, was that he was talking about a future where people were going to ameliorate the world all the while changing it. I was really touched by the emotional side of this. Additionally, it was something easily feasible in the world we live in, that is, it was to decide to give nature the rights to be represented as a legal entity in the same way as a corporation. Basically, this gives to nature the right to sue people who destroy it. I found that very clever because it’s something that rests on something really quite minimal. We always tend to think that you need to make enormous changes in making the world move. And in fact, no, it’s really only the small details that count, thanks to a system that already exists, you can change the world.
Delphine:
Camille de Toledo, here he is, he imagined that in the future, there would be houses that would have been destroyed in order to make zones of carbon rain. Then, the people who were not happy with this would take it to court. This story is very moving to me. There is a kid who says: “My father came back crying, he had tears in his eyes, and I wondered why he was crying like that, why he was so sad, what happened?” In fact, he was crying from joy, and he said: “The bees are no longer dying, if the bees stopped dying, it means that we are on the brink of achieving what we want.” He imagines that there’s been a real change, about women too. Camille de Toledo is the one who gave us the idea to launch all these lawsuits: lake Annecy against the owners of the lake, the Danube against the Vienna town hall, the North Sea against the Russian tankers, the Upper Mediterranean against the Suez Canal, the Primary Forests Association against the coal producers. It was also important to me to speak out, even if it got me back into the not-so-cool stuff. It’s true, when you get back into it, ouch! you say to yourself, that just isn’t acceptable!
Louis:
Well then, I find that perhaps what you said is a little too negative, it implies that there’s something negative in this world, in this perfect world. “Perfect” here is in quotation marks, it’s not perfect but it’s a desirable world.
Scene 4: the mudslide
Delphine:
Then, what is our heroine doing there? What’s happening to her? Above all, what is the basis of the technique?
Louis:
You write, you use up a lot of paper, you’ll write a lot of things that in the end will not be included.
Delphine:
We don’t have an ending, we’ve got nothing, we’re off on something whose beginning we know, but without knowing where we are going. What causes Camille to leave in the end?
Louis:
A mudslide.
Delphine:
A mudslide isn’t obvious to me as a resolution to the problem of the end.
Louis :
Well, we’ll chose that anyway, because it seems to be most fitting.
Scene 5: the propel stretch.
Delphine:
There is the whole propel stretch story. Listen, what do you mean exactly by your “propel stretches”?
Louis:
The propel stretch is an elastic fabric that stretches.
Delphine:
Where do you hang them? You know, what do you hang them on? It stretches, OK, but after that, how do you let it go?
Louis:
She hangs it on a branch, she stretches it herself, and she lets go and it propels her in the sky, and like that, she can even travel 50 km!
Delphine:
She’s got to have a helmet, she’s got to have a mask!
Louis:
Perhaps you don’t have to say anything, you just leave the audience to imagine things.
Delphine:
Yes, all right, you just imagine it, and it doesn’t shock people too much. We don’t want it to be too incongruous. We want things that were really possible to imagine. So, there’s none of the magic you find in fairy tales. For example, there are no animals that speak, whereas in tales, frequently, a bird talks, a deer talks, in this case no, the animals don’t speak. In any case, you don’t understand their language.
Scene 6: The abandoned zone.
Louis:
There is an abandoned zone.
Delphine:
I write “abandoned zone” with a color pencil.
Louis:
It’s not necessarily written there, projected on the wall. In fact, it’s part of the journey: here it’s the city, the grassland, and there is an abandoned zone, you know, where there are factories in ruins that are being reconverted, it’s everything you find in a city. At the top of the city in fact, it’s full of recycled oil platforms.
Delphine:
I write: “Animals, monkey bridges, insect hotel.” Everything you’d like to see in this place in your imagination. Generally speaking, we have to touch on a bit of everything, without going each time for the same things, because it can quickly be too repetitive.
Louis:
It’s a real headache.
Delphine:
For example, I would still like to speak about women, about a place where old people are taken care of, where children are born, there should be a place for this. It’s not easy to speak of all that and at the same time continue the story of Camille’s quest. It’s dense, you have to make choices, it’s sometimes not obvious to combine everything, not to make it heavy, and at the same time say everything you want to say. I would like to speak of water, of all the scarcity of lands. “Pfff” I would like to speak of money “lalala”, there are so many topics, it’s a problem.
Louis:
We start by saying “let’s keep everything, more or less everything that we want to convey,” and then, we’ve got to take out quite a lot.
Delphine:
But there’s no point in saying that, we will not talk about money.
Louis:
Well, yes, let’s get rid of it.
Delphine:
Yes, because this story is so dense!
Louis:
It’s Delphine who writes the text since she is the one speaking. I say, “you have to say that”, and she writes it. She takes notes, I give her the places and the humans, she writes and then she starts to tell it. When she has the time to do it, she makes a recording of herself and sends it to us, and then she reworks this until it helps her to make its way to her head, she has a storyline, and so she is able to take away some bits and pieces and add other ones. She sends audio files or some text, it depends, and often the big jobs are done during the residencies.
Delphine:
Louis on the sofa doesn’t write, I’m the one who does that. He’s more on his phone, searching things. For example, recently we were looking for submarine cities, he’s going to search to see what it looks like, what really exists, so that you can draw inspiration from this. Or when I said to him: “Ah! give me a synonym for this or that, because I am in the process of writing, and I don’t find the word.” Snap, he looks for it. I ask him questions: “Ah! what do you think she will do if she did that? Is it possible that she would rather do that?” – “Ah! yes, wait a minute, no, but that’s because she just does it that way!”. And me: “OK, yes, you’re right.” That’s it.
Louis:
After it’s a matter of details, I correct very little of what she’s done, I give my opinion, but I don’t say: “Tell it this way, tell it that way.” I know that she is the one who is going to speak the text. Delphine doesn’t think to consider herself as improvising, there is always a text, but she modifies the text as she speaks, for her it’s a question of memorization, the way in which her brain memorizes what will come out of her mouth, but she modifies the text a little. She listens to her recorded voice reading the text, and she changes things accordingly. When she learns it by heart, it modifies all by itself in her head. She has a mental map she’s made of where it goes, a pathway that unfolds.
Delphine:
I don’t have any memorization problems because once I take this path, I know it’s going straight and it’s rolling on. Usually, I take a text, a story, that already exists, that I’ve heard, or I’ve read, so I have a text, something like a basic traditional story. Then, I put my own chosen words, but the story still exists. Sometimes I improvise around the text. I often work on improvisation at home, but I keep the thread of the story, I don’t betray it. Even if the texts are sometimes completely written, if the text is effectively well written, and you have a refrain, this kind of little fredaine, it’s good to respect it, because it gives rhythm to your story. Often even when the stories are well written, you can really transform the way the story is written, and to tell it in a different manner, but most of the time, you keep the story line. When it’s me who writes the text, I can do what I want, if not, I have to respect it. When I’m working on a text, I search for my words by saying them loud as if I had an audience in front of me, and when I find a sentence that clicks, paf! I write it down quickly, hop! OK! I repeat it out loud and then I continue. Fixing what I say in writing means I don’t forget it, it would be a shame to when you find a sentence that has a beautiful music. It’s when I find my words, my music, that it immediately takes hold, I can recall it because it fits well. It’s when I find the right words that I can remember them better.
22. The Drawings and their Animation. Louis and Maxime.
Scene 1: Telephone call between Maxime H and Louis.
Louis:
Hello, Maxime? We got the AADN Call for Immersive Projects grant. Well, that’s it, we’re going for it.
Maxime:
So, this time, that’s it, we go for it, But I don’t know how to do comics, I don’t know how to do motion design, I absolutely don’t have the skills to do that. Frankly, I don’t know where I was going at all. Ah! Louis, eventually someone got to help me, because I don’t really draw characters, at least not animated ones, I’m more used to making background sets. How are we going to do it? What’s more, we were successful in getting a grant to be immersive, therefore, under a dome, so there are a certain number of challenges. But well, we will just have to see, let’s go for it!
Louis:
In my opinion, in order to adapt the dome to the frontal, I’m going to need some time at the lab, or we should have another residency together. I don’t intend to include you at all in most of the residencies, because you’ve just become a father, and I know what it means. There’s no need for you to come, given that you don’t play any role “live” during the performance, there is no obligation to have you present, even though, for the cohesion of the piece, it’s always more interesting to have you there.
Maxime:
Concerning the residencies, in theory – there is theory and then there is practice – everything is already done, since all my drawings should be ready. Except that if it’s the first time that they are projected, I realize that the tree I’ve drawn is too small, or it doesn’t appear with enough contrasts, so there are a lot of back-and-forths with Louis.
Louis:
In fact, I integrate the images into my software, which then projects them.
Maxime:
And as you project them to me, I often say to myself: “Oh! no, I’m not going to leave this drawing, it’s not suitable.” Or I make modifications. That’s what the residencies are for. I have to be there right from the start to go back-and-forth with Louis when he’s setting up the story to see if it’s appropriate to the place. So, how are we going to work together?
Louis:
First, we both work separately. You will have to draw a factory for the end of the Tale.
Maxime:
Ah, no, I don’t like it that way!
Louis:
Where are your drawings for the two big projects for the “Nuit Blanche” in Paris? Did you do them? Can I drop by your home to see them?
Maxime:
I’ll put them in the Dropbox, so you can check on them regularly. There are some new ones.
Louis:
Here we are, I need you to draw me a town in which buildings and nature are intermingled. They are intertwined, but still in a distinct manner, that is, you need to have passages for the animals, and then, there are other passages for humans. So, go ahead.
Maxime:
Well, I have no idea… I will make 3 or 4 sketches, but frankly, I have no idea. We’ll have to drink a fair number of coffees together.
Louis:
I’ve never bothered you, you do what you want. But yeah, I do bother you! It’s good what you did with drawing the city but just here, I see that you drew the city from above. But it should be seen from underneath, like this, it would be better, you see. You need to redo the city.
Maxime:
That’s it, I’m off again for 20 hours of drawing to remake the town.
Louis:
You see this image for only three seconds at a given moment, while this drawing takes an enormous amount of time for you to produce.
Maxime:
It’s a bit frustrating.
Louis:
If you don’t do it, it wouldn’t bother me, you don’t need to follow my advice..
Maxime :
Concerning the ways to adapt the drawings to the situation under a dome, at the beginning I had no idea what size, what level of precision I needed to make the drawing. I didn’t know, when I put my drawing in the dome, if it was going to be too small or too big, so in fact, I made it so that the drawing could be repeated laterally. That is, when you have a drawing, if you make a photocopy, for example, and place it to the left side of the initial drawing, then it connects perfectly, and so it’s infinite. I thought that if I had to draw a forest, I would start by drawing four trees, and after that I could reproduce the pattern ad infinitum. So, I could adjust according to the situation, if I realized that I needed to reproduce four times the drawing to go around you, or if it took eight times, I could in this way adjust my production, knowing that you have to be aware that if it’s too out of sync, I could stretch my drawing a bit to be at the right height. In any case, I bet on the idea of reproducing the pattern.
Scene 2: Maxime and a member of the technical team
A member of the technical team:
Hello Maxime. Do you have a question?
Maxime:
How can I adapt the image to project under the dome?
The member of the technical team:
Well, it should be a circle, so the image that’s video-projected has to be a circle.
Maxime:
OK, but my drawings are squares! And above all I am incapable of predicting the deformation that I need to apply when drawing in a circle.
The member of the technical team:
You have to draw without any deformation, and to find on your computer which command, which tool to use in Photoshop for making the deformation.
Maxime:
I searched on the web, right? I tested, I didn’t succeed! It would only make weird deformations, and I finally found that actually I could twist it into a semi-circle, and in that case, I could do a symmetrical copy-and-paste, and this would produce a full circle to be video-projected. After that, once this worked, it was really like a machine, when I make a new drawing, I prompt the same command, and it does the job automatically. Once I have a new drawing, it’s processed by the machine, and it comes out with the right size and the right deformation, then, if necessary, I can eventually make small adjustments. Once under the dome, it’s the moment of truth, and I say to myself: “I’ve anticipated in relation to what I did last time, but perhaps with this particular dome, it will need a little rescaling.” So, with each residency, there is with Louis a time of setting up where I have to give him back often almost all the contents, often one by one, and this forces him to rescale them.
Louis :
Concerning the animation of the drawings, I get one of Maxime’s drawings with inverted color, with black background instead of white. When we work under a dome, he has already processed the image to fit the dome. And then, from there, I combine them together to make it the way I want, given that the aim of animation was really to make something very simple at the beginning, and after to complexify it as the story unfolds. I enter an image into the software, and thanks to this I can animate it, displace it, and add effects, stylistic effects, on top of it. And then, to animate the images I have to launch something, so that it moves in a certain way, at a certain speed, so that it goes up or down, etc. Basically, the software is not designed to do that, but I use it that way. Then, I make some cross-fades, be it a cross-fade to black then another image, or one with another image appearing on top, or other options. And I make things move inside the image, or I add a transparency, that is, I add another image on top of the first one and I make it move over it. For example, I make the masks of the Great Council go up, fairly simple things like that. During all the first residencies, I struggle to work the control buttons, to make the image go up. Then afterwards, I have to go back to previous states of things, and once we’ve finished, the loop is ready to go, I have to go back to the beginning and remember where things are located, so as to be able to reset them to zero, and then to relaunch them, so that when I click on the thing again, it restarts the animation at the right place.
I’d done a clip for Kunta, which is Yovan’s group, I participated in a residency with them at the LabLab, where I was doing the video projection part for them (there was a guy filming), and we’re having a hell of a time, because I was on Resolume, and they had a thing where it’s precisely timed on their Medlay [27] to the second. And so, the videographer redid exactly the same shot seven times, so he could do the editing inside. It meant that all my video clips had to be timed to the nearest thousandth. Well, it was a struggle, it took us two days to do it, it was endless. Then I thought: “Never this again! It’s really too horrible.”
Scene 3: Louis, a colleague, and the software Chataigne.
A colleague:
Have you heard of another software that could control this, called « Chataigne« , which has been designed by someone from Lyon, Ben Kuperberg? With Chataigne, you could have triggered your things clip by clip, and you could have been in a timeline really down to the second. Chataigne is a sort of dashboard that establishes communication between different software programs.
Louis :
So, I start working on Chataigne, I’m relying on simple tutorials, there’s documentation, etc. I’m more or less able to launch my first clip on my own: if I press such and such a letter, it triggers the clip. But I found out that it’s better to put it on a timeline, because if I have to use all the keyboard keys, I might hit the wrong key and it wouldn’t work anymore. With the timeline, each time I press the space bar I launch something, and I can press it a second time to stop it.
Scene 4: the same, later.
A colleague:
I’m going to show you how to use cues, so that the thing would stop automatically at the right moment.
Louis:
But when I use the cues, several times it happens that when I press the space bar two things are triggered: Ah! No! not that!
The colleague:
Ah! yes, it’s true, not stupid!
Louis:
Can we use the portable phone to do it?
The colleague:
You can try it, it also works.
Louis :
So, I tried it and it worked, however, I can’t do everything, because Chataigne works well with Resolume, but I can’t retrieve the drawings, I can’t adapt Live Drawing with Chataigne. Precisely. To be exact, I can’t do it all the time, I still have to be behind my computer at certain times, especially when there’s the public participating, if only to see what they are writing. So, when it’s running, if I encounter some troubles, I have to phone friends to know how to do things. As with all the projects, it’s always happening that way.
Scene 5: Louis and the software Chataigne
Louis:
Thanks to you, Chataigne, I’m now able to create a timeline.
Chataigne:
Yes, you give me some elements.
Louis:
Here is an element, you launch this thing, you make it go up to there.
Chataigne:
Everything that you were doing practically by hand, I do it all by myself automatically. Here are five images I’ve done.
Louis:
And then, you reset the first image to zero, well, for example, such and such coordinates at 5000 pixels you reset to zero, and you put it back to a 100% opacity.
Chataigne:
Yes, Louis, with great pleasure. Thanks to me, you can top all your things now, you don’t need to click anymore, to search, to move things.
Louis:
Thanks to you, I just have to press the space bar, it unfolds the things, that’s all.
Scene 6: Louis and Maxime. Projection under the dome.
Louis:
Thanks to another software, I was able to overcome the constraints that I had in the beginning. On the other hand, when we changed to being under a dome, there really was a tricky transition, because all my things that were travelling from left to right, from top to bottom, diagonally, and when you’re under a dome, this doesn’t work. Because if you move from left to right, then you get nothing, there’s no image, and it looks a bit weird, it moves. Because under the dome you have a square image, 7000 by 7000 or 8000 by 8000, where the top is now basically at the center of the image.
Maxime:
I make the drawings with a format of a square of 4000 by 4000 pixels, and then I process them to make a circle. To make a semi-circle I’m obliged to copy a second drawing to produce a rectangle of 4000 by 8000 pixels. I then multiply the semi-circle by 2 to produce symmetrically a full circle. So, in general, I make a square drawing that will appear 4 times under the dome. The center of the circle is the highest point of the image in a dome, and that’s where the deformation is strongest. So, I don’t have any interest in getting too close to the center, because otherwise my drawings are really crushed. Since we have many outdoor scenes, my drawings are often rectangular. And when I process them with the computer, I “hop”, increase the page surface at the top and it produces a square format. And there are other elements that forced me to change strategy: for example, there is a library, with books all the way up to the ceiling, so I made a really small drawing, in a pattern that I multiplied maybe 50 times, like a wallpaper, and then, there, I was able to put it all the way to the top. The pattern is multiplied in width and height, so the drawing has to be able to be superimposed on itself both vertically and horizontally.
Louis:
In fact, it took me a while to figure out how to do it, and then to understand that if I wanted to animate an image, you had to zoom inside this 7000 by 7000 square so as to see a movement either like this or like that. So, I zoomed in and rotated. I took a series of plug-in effects on Resolume [28] that are specially adapted for the dome and enable you to do what we call “Fisheyes rotations”.
Maxime:
I could have chosen a much simpler way of drawing to fit the diverse projection formats. I could have, I think, drawn directly on an iPad, and done everything with a computer. But I work with computers all day long when I’m an architect, I really wanted to go through the felt-tip pen. It’s a rather archaic choice, everything starts with a sheet of paper sheet and a felt-tip pen. In order for my drawings to follow each other, I make my first drawing, then I place something like a bookmark with the same height as the drawings on the right-hand side of the drawing and so I extend it. Then I take this bookmark and put it on the other side of the sheet, and I extend it again in a way that it will fit. It’s this little bookmark that I can slide to the right or on the left, which will ensure the continuity of the juxtaposed drawings. It’s true that that’s very simple to show, but rather difficult to explain.
Sometimes, I worked with tracing paper: at the beginning of the piece, there’s a forest and then, there’s a city in the forest. So, I had two solutions: either I stayed archaic, and drew the forest a second time, adding the city, or I would use a old-fashioned tracing paper and would draw the city on top. That’s what I did, so I saved a lot of time, and was able to concentrate more on other things. That way, sometimes, the final drawing doesn’t really exist, it’s not completely on a single paper. It’s not as such usable for an exposition. At another moment, there is a flying vessel, I drew the vessel empty first, because we didn’t have much time. I thought it’s no big deal, I’ll just put a piece of paper on top and draw all the characters, and so if I mess up on a character, it’s all right, I am not going to lose my vessel, I will have a second chance. When I am not completely confident, I have this possibility to superpose several layers of drawings that can then function together with the computer. This is a freedom that’s quite pleasant, when you draw, everything comes from the hand, but afterwards, you can reassemble, you can correct, you can also erase things.
Using the computer, it can happen that little jointures are not always perfect, given my famous archaic technique of a bookmark, then I need to make adjustments. Consequently, I’ve found I’ve erased more when making adjustments than when reworking a drawing because of blemishes on it, like an accidental drop of coffee on my completed drawing. The computer can save me from time wasting mistakes.
Scene 7: Louis and Maxime.
Maxime:
That one’s too small, that one’s is crooked, that one’s not right.
Louis:
Here this drawing doesn’t come out right, there’s not enough contrast, or it’s too small.
Maxime:
I’m going to work on it.
Louis:
No, it’s not right, it’s too small, it’s ugly. I need to change it.
Maxime:
But I didn’t think you’d be able to come up with so many different effects so as not to make it boring and so as to make it fit the story line.
Maxime:
The sketches are made in black and white in a very loose manner, that is I let the wrist to guide me, and then, when the sketch begins to take shape, I add colors to distinguish a little the different elements. The way in which I draw is based on patterns that repeat themselves. At first, I try to find in the sketch the recipe ingredients, so from there I’m cooking things. For example, there are many trees in the drawings, so, I find the good form of a tree. Then, if it’s a city, I find the pattern of a facade, and in the case of the city, there are passageways for the animals, I’ve found a solution for this by suspending the passageways on balloons. After that, everything is assembled, I make sure that it’s always intermingled, you can see that it’s intermingled, but it doesn’t clash together. This is more or less the way I make my drawings, to have a sort of harmony between many ingredients.
I draw my first sketches with a pen, not a pencil. When I get down to the final drawing, I use a pencil to outline the main axes, that is the drawing will not be entirely made with pencil, but you’ll have the silhouette of the main elements. Then I draw them immediately with a felt-tip pen. At the end, I erase the small silhouettes I made at the beginning. Thus there are quite a few lines structuring the drawing.
I usually do my drawings with a pencil and erase this at the end, I rarely need to go back to it. I’ve done a few drawings where I try to ignore the rules of perspective, I respect them a little, but I’m quite free. Some scenes are indoor, and I wanted to do something with the right proportions, so here, it takes a much longer time: I spent maybe 2 or 3 hours just on the pencil drawing, erasing, drawing, erasing until I’ve really found the drawing, and in this case, I entirely redraw with a felt-tip pen, but it’s almost more a coloring work. Then, there are a lot of drawings where it’s a very loose outline, and straight away a completed drawing. In my drawings I use different approaches.
There is a part during the piece where the animation of the images is predominant and at the start, I don’t know how we’re going to do it. I make lots of drawings, but I don’t know how we’re going to animate them. I trust Louis, thinking he’ll know how to make the transition from, let’s say, the forest to the city, he might do a fade in black, or he will make the image appear gradually, so he is the one who is doing the true artistic creation by linking things together. So, there are characters, there are elements to integrate into the image, it’s him who will position them, and make them move (because we have some objects that move).
23. A traditional music of the future?
Scène 1 : Louis et Yovan.
Louis:
I want you to make me some traditional music of the future.
Yovan:
It’s a complicated thing, because a traditional music is already full of codes, it’s not the way I work.
Louis:
I say that because I am under the influence of Super Parquet, a group that mix electronic music with traditional music from Central France, which I heard in concert and I liked a lot, I like this type of traditional music of the future.
Yovan:
The idea is rather to make an electronic music that wouldn’t only be synthetic, and above all, I’m not acquainted with the practice of a traditional music. Let’s let the audience imagine things. We can be inspired by a lot of different sources, this corresponds better to my way of thinking.
Louis:
If I mentioned the idea of traditional music of the future, it was just to give you a little orientation.
Yovan:
Traditional music might be more reassuring to me if I approached it with the idea of modernizing it; this could really become a base for my work, since I don’t have too many rules, and I don’t know where to start. I prefer to say that I start with an electronic music that’s also somewhat organic.
Louis:
Concerning traditional music, I’d spoken with Jacques Puech [29], thanks to the Aleph ensemble, and he told me that traditional music is in fact much more alive than any written music, because it continuously evolves as it goes along. So, I thought it would be interesting to effectively go and see this side of things.
Yovan:
Yeah, I like it, I’m going to use some loops of African traditional music, loops of I-don’t-know-what.
Louis:
We are not really talking about the social functions of traditional music, nor about how it’s written, or how it reaches definitive form.
Yovan:
It’s more something like: “I’m going to take bits and pieces and I am going to adapt them to my own brew”.
Louis:
In any case, knowing your music, I’m not expecting for you to have a traditional music approach.
Music elaboration. Pre-recorded or live music. Louis and Yovan.
Scene 1: Louis and Yovan.
Louis:
It’s a matter of creating an immersive spectacle with a musician on stage.
Yovan:
I like to have a well-defined framework to understand what you want.
Louis:
I would like you to improvise while doing your own music.
Yovan:
I don’t want to do that, for me it means everything and nothing. If you want me to compose musical productions such as electronic music pieces or anything else I can do, it would have to be defined in our grant applications, because we have to put it into precise words. You have to explain things and give references to traditional music.
Louis:
It’s a tale about ecology, about the planet, about nature.
Yovan:
Then, maybe we need something more than just electronics, with organic instruments as well. But if you want, I can do some live music with the violin and effects.
Louis:
No, I’d like you to compose music because you are usually composing for other projects, either electro, pop or other things.
Yovan:
In that case, I might as well try to time what’s happening with Delphine so that the music corresponds, with noise effects, and all that. It’s simpler to put only a little bit of live music, but to give priority to a musical writing where I have more freedom to compose, and not just play violin.
Louis:
It would be good to have several instruments.
Yovan:
I will try to do something that follows Delphine and what she’s telling, and then I’ll see what I can play live as we go along. Since I’m always on my mouse to be certain to trigger some noise effect at the right time with Delphine, then I’m not going to play everything live, I’ve got to make choices. Consequently, there are lots of things that will be pre-written, with this idea of having electronic pieces, and at some point, as you want violin, yes, I can stand up. But at the beginning I have to be in darkness.
Louis:
No, you have to be seen.
Yovan:
It’s true that it’s important for people to see me, so I ask you, is it also important to have drawings of me? You have to choose.
Louis:
Good question, let’s have violin playing at some point, it’d be a good thing.
Yovan:
OK, certainly to have a violin on stage add something to the performance.
Louis:
You have to assume this fact.
Yovan:
Here, we are on something different, you’re taken in by the images, there’s live music, now, these moments of violin playing works well, they provide some breathing space. Then, it’s always good for the audience to see an instrumentalist playing on stage, it’s more pleasant than to have him in the dark. It’s little by little as you go along that you realize what’s needed in the performance.
Yovan:
We wrote the funding proposal based on these ideas, and afterwards obviously it was realized a bit differently. Before submitting the proposal to AADN, Louis had asked me to compose a piece – given that it was just a project of which I knew a little the concept, but I didn’t really know much more – in relation to the specifications we’d set for the music on the proposal, I tried to create a piece a bit like that. I had started on an “instrument” based on some sample of African drumming, and it had at the end created a little piece. It was just a question of having a little bit of music, and after that it completely changed. This sample of African drumming was reused in the spectacle – it was the first segment I did – just when she flies over the forest at the beginning. After that I composed the intro piece with the sounds of birds and of the forest, because it’s when Delphine presents the forest.
Louis:
To be honest, I was not expecting that he would use his voice. You should know that Yovan is currently a singer: it’s practically all that what he does now. Yovan plays the violin live, but his voice is recorded, because he used it by superposition of his own voice to produce a choir effect, he records himself on a fair number of things. When I heard what he first sent me, I thought that it was not at all what I wanted, but in the end, I love it. In effect, this has nothing to do with the traditional music of the future, that’s not what he does.
25. The music and storytelling, Delphine et Yovan.
Yovan:
Then Delphine came along, and once she had put the story into words, it was a matter of finding the moments where I would have space for music. I asked Delphine to record her voice, so that I could listen to what she was telling.
Delphine:
So, I sent a recording to everyone, and they listened to it at home over and over again. With Yovan, we created things together, and we were lucky because we got on really well straight away. He pre-recorded music on what he’d heard from me, and we both tried things out together to see how it fit. There were things he’d done that didn’t fit. Because once I was telling the story for real, it didn’t work. I had sent him the text, but when it came to telling the story, it was another matter. He had to change, and to do a lot of work in adapting the music to a storyteller.
Yovan:
Delphine is the one who influenced the most the final sound result, because I listen to the way she tells the story.
Scene: Delphine and Yovan.
Yovan:
Hey! there, it would be good to cut a little. There, I suggest cutting the narration and putting some music there instead. Here, during your talking, it would be good to have a little music behind it to provide some rhythm.
Delphine:
I like the fact that you bring a music that also gives me a rhythm. It helps me, it creates a mood, and a rhythm too.
Yovan:
The easiest thing for me to do is to find the rhythm as a function of your text. Often you and Louis are really focused on writing the tale, while I am more concerned with the rhythm [he knocks regular strokes on the table with his hand], like that… like that… The rhythm of the performance: when telling the story, doesn’t matter how long it takes, is there any rhythm?
Delphine:
You have to wonder if it isn’t a bit boring at certain moments?
Yovan:
Yes. In two of the compositions, I play violin. It’s really a question of two moments: one is improvised during the walking sequence [la balade], I wrote something simple, something that I determined by playing, that I’ve developed by improvising and that now I try to keep all the time. It’s all to do with the rhythm of the performance.
Delphine:
I think you agree with our taking into account together the variations that we might make.
Yovan:
Yes, I agree completely.
Delphine:
If you hear me say something which has the same meaning as what I usually say, but not with the same words, there’s always a silence indicating that I’ve finished, then you throw on the music.
Yovan:
I will try to do something that follows what you’re telling, and then I’ll see what I can play live as we go along.
Delphine:
Yeah, I try to respect what you do, we juggle together in reciprocity. It’s mutual, but it’s more me adapting to you, but it’s still you who has also to do it with me.
Yovan:
Right on cue, when you say that, paf! I throw on the music, paf! you say that.
Delphine:
Except that I don’t know the text by heart.
Yovan:
At exactly that moment, when you say that, a silence follows, we have to frame that.
Delphine:
I am a storyteller! How do you expect me to remember that?
Yovan:
We also have to find noise effects because they are needed at certain points.
Delphine:
They must be in synchrony between you and me. For example, at one point, there’s a talisman that falls to the ground, it tumbles down 4 or 5 steps, then it stops magnetized on a book. We must be exactly together, it’s really a precise sound effect. But then, it’s easy to achieve in the sense that I know that from the moment I start unwrapping what I say about the talisman that she has in her pocket, that she feels in her pocket, it falls to the ground, here we go! you trigger it. She searches with her hand in her pocket, and you know that you have to send the noise effect..
Yovan:
The noise effects are sometimes fabricated: for example, at one point there’s an electronic firefly, it’s necessarily a cliché. I had in mind a sound in Star Wars where you had a sort of butterfly on Tatooine, a sort of flying character. I remember the noise of the wings, so I tried to retrieve it – as Louis loves Star Wars, he might know the reference – it was not obvious to achieve a good result.
26. The music and storytelling. Louis et Yovan
Louis:
It’s not because the music is written that it’s completely fixed, there are many moments when he plays loops, and he produces a certain amount of noises to correspond to the action on stage.
Yovan:
Later, we found other solutions: for example, against a wall, an acoustic wall with holes (there are plenty of little squares in the walls), so we put our fingers in them, “Brrrrrrrrrrr”, it sounded a bit like wing noises, a sort of electronic firefly noise. I made this sort of sounds. Otherwise, I went on Spice where there are sound samples, the Sonotec, and interesting stuff like that. The sounds that we used were often nature sounds, and then it depended on the situations. At some point, there is a story of a snap hook, when she hooks herself on a cable, you have to find a snap hook sound. When you can’t find this online, you have to fabricate it, it’s another type of work. At another moment in the piece, there are the lightning hunters who start to sing, it’s really what the text says, so I wrote a song a bit like a pseudo-Gregorian chant, it’s not really that, but it’s something kind of epic.
Scene 1: Delphine, Louis and Yovan.
Yovan:
Well, there, that lacks noise effects, you’ve got to hear the lightning.
Louis:
You need to have noise effects, but you should have them before the lighting.
Yovan:
As Delphine sees the lightning hunters, they are already behind her, they are coming. Hey! It would be good if, on the lightning hunters for example, as she tells something, not to have any music, and while she is speaking, the music will come back little by little.
Delphine:
In fact, shortly after, I stop talking for two minutes and let the music play on.
Yovan:
The music continues while the hunt is going on. You have to find ways to divide her text in sections to insert musical pieces in between or to treat the text as a musical element. That way, we are in complete agreement, and it works well.
Yovan:
I also sing a little, I use it for having choirs in my compositions (by re-recording my voice) or just a single voice, but I don’t pretend to be a singer.
Scene 2: Delphine, Louis and Yovan.
Louis:
Why not having the audience sing along?
Yovan:
Yeah, but at that point, aren’t we going to lose something? In fact, you will look up and see the hunters rushing off, and I find that this part is good as it is.
Delphine:
Louis and I, we would like to have the audience sing along.
Yovan:
Come on! You’ll have to find another way to do it, at another time in the spectacle.
Yovan:
For me it was far too many ideas, this is what was difficult, in any case at the beginning, to figure out what to do with them. It was because Louis’ role was to imagine things, it was really a good thing, because the universe he wanted to develop is very interesting, but then, he brings along so many things in addition to the scenario, the idea of talking about ecology, the drawings, the storyteller, the music, the live music, several instruments (etc.), that you have simply to make some choices at a certain point.
Scene 3: Louis and Yovan.
Yovan:
Well, here, it might be interesting that for a given time she tells the story, and there it might be interesting to have a musical interlude while she is walking.
Louis:
We can try to imagine those moments.
Yovan:
So that I could have at least something on which I could rely.
Yovan:
So, things are coming together little by little because we had to think about everything, it was for all of us our first spectacle, we hadn’t given it much thought. Louis had the concepts, but he didn’t have all the keys of this ambitious project. But it’s a good thing, because we learned lots of things along the way, we discovered the world of noise effects, and so on.
27. Yovan’s ideas on music and Maxime’s ideas on drawings.
Yovan:
I knew Maxime a little before. I’d not seen much of his drawings, but I knew he was working in architecture. I also knew him through Louis’ Live Drawing Project. Maxime’s drawings straight away create an atmosphere, a little like a giant graphic novel, that’s what I appreciate a lot. The question is then to decide how much storytelling, how much music, how many drawings to put in. Because once you’ve put the drawings in, some say: “Well, there should be more of that” and others say: “There should be less of that, because you’re not looking at the storyteller.” It was very ambitious, because there is so much stuff, that’s the normal way of making a spectacle. I didn’t see the drawings until the residencies because Louis receives the drawings, and he has to adapt their format for projecting them in the specific space. Then, sometimes I thought: “Hey, it would be nice to have something like you have in the scenography of an electro concert where such and such an image appears during the music, that is in some particular timing.” In the end, it turned into “cues”: “There, I throw this music when a drawing appears, it would be nice if we were immediately in a new atmosphere.” There are few “beeps” like that. Personally, I’d have liked to have more communication, but well, it does communicate a little anyway, but I think we could go even further with it in the future.
Maxime:
What I like in the “Tale of a Common Future”, and what I find extremely astonishing, it’s really the hybrid construction of the project. In fact, we never intrude on each other’s work, and that’s the way Louis built the team. It’s him who comes up with a story that he builds up as he goes along, with enough information to enable us to invent things. Sometimes, when he gives us information, I have the impression that he hasn’t really the image in his head. So, I say to myself: “OK, I don’t know where I am going, but I’ll show you something and we’ll see.” So, I think it’s the same with Yovan and Delphine, where we bring our ideas, and then, in the exchange, the things evolve slightly, and Louis is still very flexible about what he wants. In other words, he knows the essence of what he wants, but he doesn’t need to control the form of what he wants. At times, I took him where he hadn’t planned to go, but he said: “OK, it’s in line with my story.” I think he did a good job of linking us up, and we were each able to have our own “corridor” (in quotation marks) of expression, which added up without being in each other’s way, going from strength to strength. That’s what I like in this project, we each work a bit in our own corner, me at my desk, Yovan, I don’t know where, Delphine, I imagine, on her computer to write texts, and at the end, we add up, and this makes the thing even better.
Yovan:
The format of the composition was a bit like electronic music, with the repetitive aspect that can be found in techno, in electro music, but with a musical idea, and so, there is often a repetitive beat. The direction I took was to start with something based on an organic instrument or something like that, for example a Chinese instrument that resembles a banjo. In short, it was starting off with a traditional music instrument and then having at the same time that electronic aspect. I knew in any case that the pieces couldn’t be too long because we soon realized that when Delphine was telling the story, and in relation to all the worlds that Louis wanted to explore, it would be impossible to linger. During the week I was composing on my own, I thought: “Hey, it would be good to have these three pieces, simply because afterwards I won’t have the time to do the rest before the first residency when I am supposed to have written it all. I’m not going to linger on each composition, and eventually as there’s a very repetitive side to it, it’s something that I can develop along the way.”
Maxime:
For me, Louis is at the center of the project, therefore I had fewer interactions with the others, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem. I think that the music fits in very well with the drawings and I think Louis gave good indications. I didn’t get the sounds much in advance, so I can’t say that the sounds have influenced my way of drawing, and I don’t know to what extent Yovan was influenced by the drawings that I sent to the group.
Yovan:
With Maxime’s drawings, at some point in the performance there is question of velocity, there was a bicycle ride. I looked at Maxime’s images and said: “There, it would be good if we could create an electro night ambiance, where the sound system gradually builds up: at the beginning there is the kick drum and the bass, and then little by little things are added. I saw in these images something of this kind, and it influenced me to propose this idea.
Maxime:
I think that certain drawings imply that the music is very present at certain characteristic moments: at some point, the story takes place in the clouds, it was quite clear what you had to represent for the audience. So, I drew clouds and lightning, and Yovan made sounds of lightning and after that, he added a melody, I did it in my graphic manner and he did it with sounds and we ended up at the same place. Then, there is a walk in the forest, and it’s the same thing: I can see what I have to draw as a forest, and he can see also what we expect from a forest. The question that we both have to answer is the same, and we come up with a result that’s more or less in good synchrony.
Yovan:
I try to introduce musical elements, samples, or songs: at one point there’s a Greek song, at another one there is a kind of Chinese cithara, for each segment of music I try to think this way, mixing acoustic instruments with electronics. It’s fairly free anyway, my basic premise quickly turned into something else, as I really think in terms of sound illustration of what Delphine is saying. When she presents a specific universe, I try to stick to it, as in theatre or film music, to illustrate the storytelling. The music shouldn’t in this case take over, and at the same time you can have moments of music without narration, so that you feel like: “Well, here we have a moment when you can listen to the music with drawings, that’s nice”, something like that. It’s a question really of not just considering the coherence of using a scale or a concept, but of saying to yourself: “Well, we have to find a balance between these different moments of narration and music.”
Maxime:
I had very few direct exchanges with Yovan, we didn’t need to. I could call him, no worries, but we didn’t need to do it. While with Delphine, there were more exchanges.
Yovan:
Basically, I’ve got my frame, a Cubase session. I have the impression that somehow it’s my performance frame. I write down the performance frame on paper, it’s really like a setlist, it’s written in big letters to be able to see it on stage. It’s written on a discreet piece of paper, I’ve got all the main features in this setlist. It’s an automatization of events, but the problem is that each time we change location, sometimes we are in 7.1 and sometimes in 4.1, I have to change things. With my automations, you’ll have, for example, the sound in the middle, here you’ll be on the far right, there at the middle, at the left middle side, there on the far left, and so on. With the rain for example, there are other noise effects, I put them on the left… All this introduction, here [he plays a short extract], I double it on Sequential OB-6 (an analogue synthesizer), because once it’s in the loudspeakers, it lacks analog presence. There are things that I only do on the keyboard, where you have only noise effects [he plays another extract]. I touch the diverse keys to trigger different segments or sound effects, it’s really a mess, I know more or less how to find my way around: I am going there, then I know that I have to go down to trigger the noise effects..
28. The Tale and Drawings. Delphine, Maxime et Louis
Scene 1: Delphine, Louis and Maxime.
Louis:
Listen, Maxime, you’ve got to draw me a forest, let’s go, with animals in the forest, and then you’ve got to draw me clouds, you’ve got to draw…”
Maxime:
Oh! yes, there, when Delphine says that, I need to add this. Then there, I must absolutely draw the machine at the end. And I must do a control panel.
Louis:
There, you should have bubbles to aggregate to an underwater cable.
Delphine:
I think of these bubbles as living spaces.
Maxime:
I drew bubbles with coral around them.
Delphine:
But I don’t understand, why is there coral around them? Then what did you put inside them? The bubbles are the workplaces for the coral, we have to agree on what we’re saying, we have to tell the same thing, you with the drawings, and me with the text.
Maxime:
It doesn’t mean that we have to say and show the same things at the same time.
Delphine:
Yes. If you draw that, well then, I won’t tell it, we won’t do twice the same thing. And that makes it easier for me because I already say a lot. Draw the hunters, the lightning, you have to do it, we have to see them, even if I mention them in the text.
Maxime:
We are all the time debating: what should be illustrated, and what shouldn’t?
Delphine:
In storytelling, usually, nothing is visually illustrated, there are no drawings, what I’m telling is left to the imagination of the audience.
Louis:
I want people to retain a measure of imagination, I don’t want them to be given everything, The tale should still be based on imagination.
Delphine:
If we start by throwing everything at them in the drawings, then I don’t serve any purpose, I won’t speak anymore, it’s a story in drawings. People still need to be able to imagine things. So, we’re always trying to reach a compromise on what we should illustrate.
Maxime:
Sometimes I wonder: “Oh! I didn’t draw that, it’s a shame, I would have like to do it.”
Delphine:
Yeah!
Louis:
Yeah! but the more you present drawings, the more people want them.
Delphine:
You see, it’s not easy to reach a compromise. What should be in drawings? What should be left to the audience’s imagination?
Maxime:
So, there are a lot of things that are not in the drawings.
Scene 2: Delphine and Maxime. During a residency.
Delphine:
Louis asked me to say at this precise moment: “Big white bubbles”.
Maxime:
We decide on a signal, “beep”, so that the drawing appears when you say that. Beep!
Delphine:
[She turns her back to the screen]
“Big white bubbles floating on water and in the air”
[She turns around and see that the bubbles are black!]
Maxime:
OK, you are sticking to the text!
Delphine:
Not at all! I have to respect what was agreed with Louis, I’m not going to come to the performance and say something completely different from what we decided. And sometimes I have to stick to the music, because sometimes Yovan is waiting for me, he knows there is a beep, I know there’s a beep, I’ve got to go there. So yes, I still have to respect a text, but sometimes I can vary, I don’t have to use the same words all the time, I can add things, I can modulate. But there are things that I absolutely have to respect because I’m not on my own. We are three in the story, in fact four.
Scene 3: Delphine and Maxime
Maxime:
Delphine, at the start, you sent me five minutes of the text of the piece, and I made drawings based on this. But there were other parts for which you hadn’t really written anything, and I was ahead with my drawings.
Delphine:
In this case, I was inspired by the drawings for small details in the narration as a hook, that sort of thing.
Maxime:
At some point there is a town, and it’s not easy to describe a town if you can’t visualize it, so I think it helped you to see my drawing.
Delphine:
That way I was able to add little details to the story.
Maxime:
I have to draw a road, Camille is coming on that road on a bicycle, and she says that she has to avoid the roots. No luck I have no narrative roots! I can’t draw your roots, instead I’ll draw a hen. You will have to change your text a little. At another moment, there is a ship with barrels, with baskets, moving down, things like that, and I think that as you haven’t yet written the text and as I’ve done the drawing, you can directly base your descriptions on it.
Delphine:
For the city, you must have patios.
Maxime:
It’s better to talk about passageways or things like that. There is the need to readapt the vocabulary in this way.
Maxime:
My drawings are part of the background sets, they often support the narrative, but often the narration and the drawings don’t say the same thing. So, Delphine will spend a lot of time describing the actions that are going to happen and finally, she will not need to describe the sets since it would be redundant. So, when you arrive at an amphitheater, she will say “Here we are, we are in an amphitheater.” But finally, it didn’t really constrain me in what I should draw. And then, since the amphitheater appears, people see it, and she does not need to describe it precisely anymore, she will immediately tell what’s happening in this amphitheater. Because we also chose not to visually represent the heroine of the spectacle and to represent only very few characters, except when it was visually pretty strong or if it helped to take away certain ambiguities. At the beginning, we almost wanted to have none of the characters represented, but we realize that it was too strict a rule, that there was no reason to be so hard on ourselves in imposing it, and that wasn’t that important, you could have drawings of characters. So really, Delphine and I, we work side by side, and the result is an amplification that adds without ever lowering the quality, we are in our own rails without impeding each other.
For example, at some point a giant woman appears, so I made a giant drawing. It’s visually quite beautiful because when we’re under a dome, I can really make a very tall character. And it works very well because in this case, the storyteller ends up personifying the heroine who is small. I like this ambiguity, I don’t know to what extent it was basically intended, as the storyteller is supposed to be the narrator. But inevitably there are times when I think that the public perceives her as the main character, as she sometimes speaks on behalf of the heroine. I think that’s also the role of a storyteller: personifying all the characters and being at the same time the narrator. The fact that there are not many characters, the fact of not representing the main character, creates a situation where the audience doesn’t know whether the storyteller is the main character or the narrator, when in fact she is both at the same time, playing with this ambiguity. I don’t know to what extent it’s assumed by Louis, but it’s fine with me.
We discussed the idea whether or not we should show the characters. We tested the giant figure with the audience, and we got good feedback. At one point we removed it, and we thought it was less effective, we liked it when she appeared.
29. Sonorization
Yovan:
Usually, we play with a sound engineer, and we work on this aspect of sonorization. In Nantes, for example, we had an excellent sound engineer, the balance was made over one week, we worked every day on it. When in certain residencies, we are told at the last minute, “you may use this space, but there is no sound engineer.” Delphine can be tense because we are running out of time before the premiere, then the sound is not very good. The balance between Delphine’s voice and the music is essential; if it’s not right, it can bring prejudice to the performance. So, we worked a lot on that.
Delphine:
Before the Tale of the Common Future, my voice had never been amplified. The guitarist I performed with had an acoustic guitar. Amplification has a very odd and surprising effect on me, and it changed my relationship with the public: I can speak very softly, I can whisper, it depends also on the quality of the amplification, which was very good when we had a good sound engineer, and very bad at other times.
Yovan :
The problem is that every time we change space and equipment, and we don’t have a sound engineer attached to the group who knows in two minutes what to do, we have to adapt. But when there is a good sound engineer, I have been helped a lot, particularly in learning to use Dante for mixing in 7.1, it’s a digital sound card, which is generally integrated on the mixing boards of the sound engineers nowadays, and which means you don’t need to have a sound card in your computer, but you can go through an ethernet wire, and have your balance done directly according to the place. With Dante, you can communicate with the mixing board. So, I come with my 7.1 configuration, and I just trigger it, and if I come to a new place which has also Dante but is in 4, because there are only 4 loudspeakers, then, I just have to change my configuration, I don’t even need to do a balance. So, it’s very useful, but in all the residencies, we had this system only twice, unfortunately, there are lot of places that don’t have Dante. I have my digital sound card installed in my computer in order to be able to do the balance when they don’t have Dante. In any case, every time, you have to pull your hair out for at least one day of technical sound preparation, and also the night, before you can start working on the spectacle.
Delphine :
It can be a real pain if the amplification is not good, because I think that there’s something intimate about this spectacle. If my microphone works well, I don’t need to speak loudly, which is for me an effort because I tend to have a lot of energy.
Louis:
She isn’t yet used to speaking in a microphone, it’s often a technical problem of audio return, she doesn’t hear herself well, it’s a problem of sonorization, she has to hear herself as well as the audience does. Clearly, it’s not exactly the same situation as in tradition of storytelling. If people from the tale-telling world come to see the performance, they might think it’s not a tale at all, because in a tale you never show any images, there’s rarely any music, and generally it’s one person alone telling a story to a public. There is no distancing between the storyteller and the audience, so, the microphone creates a distance, but it’s not the same situation. I think that there’s a certain distance that takes place, but it operates in two ways: on the one hand, when she tells the story, she distances herself from the public, on the other hand, after that, she comes back very strongly towards them when she comes to ask them questions.
Yovan:
With each residency you have to adapt your system, with electronics there’s always issues. Often, you don’t know why, only two loudspeakers worked out of four, then finally we have them, OK. You have to take care of the image and the sound. When there’s no sound engineer and there are all these noise effects that usually go through 8 loudspeakers, but suddenly you have only four of them, it’s not the same settings. So, I have three configurations, I have 5 points, 4 points and 7 points, and each time I have to readjust. With respect to noise effects, there are two or three pieces where I made what we call Stems, [30] that is I separated the bass from the drums, the chords, and the voices, to mix them a little together. You can have the bass located here, and the drum set there, to make it more immersive. In fact, it didn’t like it on all the pieces, because sometimes it was not easy to understand, I preferred having a source coming out in stereo, with the noise effects behind, otherwise I thought it was too scattered. It’s the sound engineer who initiated me to Dante who knew all about that. He tried to remix my pieces, I sent him the Stems of my pieces.
Delphine:
When we played the piece in Paris, Marie-France Marbach came to see me at the end and said: “Listen, you have to get some voice training, you can’t go on like this.” Since then, I’ve been doing a training course in Lyon with a lady, Mireille Antoine, qui est extra. Une dame avec un charisme incroyable et en même temps une grande humilité. Ellwho is extra. A lady with incredible charisma and at the same time a great humility. She makes me work on my voice which tends to be too forceful. The voice is actually a very intimate thing, so she immediately sees a bit of what I told you before about myself. She says to me: “Well, you do everything forcefully, you’re a warrior, you’ve built everything up, your identity is your strength, you’ve put in so much support, you’ve put up a shield, to make sure that you’ll never be vulnerable again. So, we will have to break down the walls, so that your voice comes from the belly so as not to block emotion.” Because you your own emotions are not what matter, it’s the audience that you want to get carried away. And it’s also dangerous for me to give it all, I’m hurting myself. And it might be unpleasant for the audience too because it’s not on them to carry this burden. So, it takes some work to place your voice and also to put some distance from what you’re saying, to let the voice resonate and not to get carried away. It’s an intense work, but very interesting.
Yovan:
For example, once, a sound engineer said to Delphine: “You’re speaking far too loud in your mike, you don’t need to do that.” She is used to speaking acoustically, so, he turned her mike down and she was more careful. When she is stressed, she tends to speak louder, and then, sometimes the music is too loud in relation to the voice, that’s something I can control. In Nantes, everything went well, we had a good rhythm, a full week to rehearse each scene, so, we found a balance that worked better. Sometimes you realize that in such and such place you are less at ease, that’s the nature of live performance. That’s the way it is.
Delphine:
I tend to speak loudly, so I really have to make an effort to keeping my voice down. It’s true that with the presence of a sound engineer, you give up part of the responsibility, in the sense that if my voice sounds through amplification like a carpet dealer, it might quickly be perceived as someone selling detergents on the market. In this case, there is nothing I can do about it, no matter how softly I speak, or try to put more music in my voice, this type of sound will remain. If the sound is rotten, however you may try to “na na na,” nothing can be done.
30. Communication with Notion [31]
Maxime:
We use Notion, a software that shares things between several participants. For example, Louis tells me: “Well, there, with Delphine, we have written a text. She has to clean up a text and she puts it on Notion, that’s the link.” So, I click on it, and I see that, effectively, she’s updated it a day before and that’s the last version of the text. If a week later I have to take up the text, it’s possible that she’s changed it. In this way, I have the updated version, it allows me to be always working on the last version.
Delphine:
With Louis, the good thing is that we communicate with Notion software, I can write on it, and he can have immediate access to it. Sometimes when I have questions, I write and then call him, saying: “Look at what I have done. What do you think of it?”
Yovan:
Louis uses Notion to communicate a series of resources, texts that inspired me, particularly about biocracy. We talked about that together. You have to ask Louis about biocracy because it’s a concept that inspired him a lot, especially concerning the major lawsuits included in the piece, that allow nature, a river, a tree, to have the same rights as human beings and therefore to be able to sue a company like Total. This concept is interesting and corresponds well to the Tale idea of human beings reconnecting with nature. He put lots of resources on this on Notion.
Maxime:
I have all my drawings on computer, and I share them with Louis on Dropbox. That way I know if Louis likes them – because I don’t necessarily know that – but there is a little notification to that effect. When I’ve put up a new drawing, I call him, I am proud of myself.
Scene 1: Maxime and Louis.
Maxime:
Listen, frankly, I worked hard, I’ve made three new drawings.
Louis:
Yes I know, I saw the Dropbox notification the day before yesterday.
Maxime:
Ah! yes, OK.
Louis:
Yes, I looked at them, it’s fine, perfect! OK!
Maxime:
And then, in the way we work, it’s true that Louis and I, we like participatory tools, participatory software, so he made some sorts of to-do list that we can both consult, each of us saying to ourselves: “Ah! I’ll mark this, so he will see that I’ve done it”. I think that these tools improve things significantly. Then, I still like the informal chat over the telephone, to talk about this and that, where we can go much further into things. I think there are elements of messages that are important, mostly when I send drawings in progress in order to have feedback before I finish them. Messages are very useful when they tell me what direction to take or give me the chance to diverge from common meaning. I would rather use the chat like that to balance my contents and to confirm the feedback if everything goes well. What’s more, when we are more in the prospective phases, with Louis, we usually go to see or call each other. I think that when we don’t know something, it’s not enough to be on WhatsApp, on a chat group to make a project. That means seeing each other at certain times. On the other hand, there’s a huge amount of working time that’s done on one’s own. So, it’s very much a hybrid thing, there are important points for discussions, and then, there are all the individual times.
Yovan:
In fact, I’ve found that, in the groups I play with, they often say: “Well, we’re not on Messenger, we’re not on WhatsApp, we’re on Signal, it’s better”. So, I receive a lot of links, and they tell me: “It’s true, we don’t go on that sort of stuff anymore.” Notion is interesting, yes, Louis likes all these ways of communication, I haven’t been on it that much, but that’s the place where we send each other things and where you can see what has been changed. I think there are plenty of interesting resources, but for me it’s a question of time. If there’d been a year with less things to do, I would have had more time to go on it. And then, since we’re already talking about it, and I just need few elements to write the music, I just have to think about it.
Maxime:
In terms of software, it’s really only Notion, WhatsApp and then, Dropbox. And concerning the forms of discussion, it’s really going to be either the WhatsApp group, or me calling Louis or sometimes Delphine for the tale, but less so because it’s mainly Louis who is in contact with her. It’s really Louis who is mastering the flow of things with everyone. So, when we call him, he can pass on the information, he is mostly at the center and things revolve around him. That’s why we call him “the creator” who kind of pilots everything. He doesn’t write, there is no visible content, even though he creates the content and sets my drawings in motion.
31. Residencies: LabLab, Chevagny, Vaulx-en-Velin,
Enghien-les-Bains.
Louis:
I plan the residencies down practically to the minute: this morning we talk about that, then everybody introduces themselves, then we take a break, we go for a walk together, then we come back, then we work on the beginning of the tale, etc. This I do for practically all the residencies, what’s going to happen hour by hour. And this was very useful to us many times when you find yourself lost in things, you are in the thick of things, you are doing things, and suddenly you’ve got a blank page, you don’t know what to say or what to do anymore. So, you tell yourself: “Ah! well, we’d planned a walk in the forest,” hop, well forest walk it is, then. I had ideas like that: the fact of walking in the forest, since at the beginning of the story, it takes place in a forest, I wanted to take them up in the trees, do some acrobranching and sleep in the trees, but I never did it. Here, I found one of these schedules:
10h-11h am : Presentation of our universe.
11h-noon: Presentation of the project.
Noon-1h30 pm: Lunch.
1h30-3h: Free exploration of tomorrow’s world, where are we going?
3h-5h: And above all with whom?
5h-5:30h: The day in review, what are we going to do tomorrow?
If we don’t know what to do: tomorrow, touring the village, to talk together.
Let’s talk now about the writing residencies, I call them “emerging residencies.” First, on January 6 and 7, 2022. Then we met again on May 5 and 6, 2022. We did a music residency with Yovan and me on January 27, 2022, that finished with a Visio-conference with the four of us. Then we did an “unfolding the tale” on June 23 and 24, 2022 with everybody.
Then, we had the “unfolding the tale” residency on June 23 and 24, 2022. This residency was again at the LabLab in Lyon. We used this place a lot. All four were present. Here is the pre-established schedule:
10h. am: Presentation of the state of progress of the narrative plot and feedback; presentation of music and feedback, presentation of drawings and feedback, presentation of Live Drawing and feedback.
11h30: Identifying contact zones between music and drawings, between storytelling and public participation.
Noon: Lunch.
1h pm: Installation, set-up drawing projections and music.
1:30h: First scene.
3:30h: Second scene.
4:30h: Pause.
5h: Third scene.
It was a bit ambitious, I don’t know if we were successful in fulfilling this schedule. After that, 6:30 pm, it’s the end. And then comes Friday:
9h. am: Feedback on Day 1.
10h.: Scene 0, which was the welcoming of the public, we gave a lot of thinking to how we were going to welcome the audience, because that was really part of the immersion and to showing how to use the tools, to explain how it was going to happen.
11h.: Go-through scenes 1, 2, and 3.
1h. pm: Public presentation
At the end of the residency, we’d do a small public presentation, and then after some feedback, we were supposed to work a little more before everyone would leave. Except that we didn’t do anything after the performance, we were exhausted. So, I thought that we should never work anymore after a performance.
In August 2022, we did our first real residency, where at the end the totality of the Tale was going to be presented. It was part of the festival « Chevagny Passions » [32], thanks to Antipode and Chevagny-Passions. For the first time we were paid. We spent one day with Antipode, and at the beginning, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I worked with Delphine only, and Friday Yovan arrived, and we worked all three together. And we played Saturday once, and twice Sunday. And we managed to produce a performance with over 20 minutes of the piece. We get super positive feedback from the audience, for each of the three performances we perform in front of about 60 to 80 people.
Maxime:
We did a first residency without a dome at Chevagny-sur-Guye, during which we had tested the idea of having drawings with a storyteller, with sound, and with an audience that had reacted quite favorably to the participation tool. Finally, there are the four of us, plus the participatory tool that brings the public into the story
Louis:
The performances took place in the church, I recuperated our video projector that we have with Live Drawing, which enabled us to cover the totality of the back wall of the church. All the church’s benches were taken out, and replaced by reclining chairs, poufs, carpets. We were highly welcome.
The planning helps me because it makes me feel more secure. Let’s just say that it allows me not to get lost, and since after all I am the leader of a team, it’s better not to have any blanks. I know that I shouldn’t come and just say: “Ah! well, I don’t know what we are going to do.” I know that it would destabilize them, it wouldn’t please them.
It works, and we’re happy, and it’s just one month before the Vaux-en-Velin Planetarium residency, for which we have two weeks of work to do. The aim was to produce a 30-minute performance up to the scene with the “Great Council.” It was the first time that the visuals were adapted for a dome, and that took an enormous amount of time. The music was adapted for sound spatialization and we moved on with the storyline by finishing the “hunt for lightnings”, creating “the city” and “the Great Council”. Also, we discussed the budget and the planning of the pedagogical interventions that we decided to implement.
Maxime:
Each time we have to adapt to a place, because if you change the performance space, you change the screen size, so it’s possible that certain drawings will get a bit squashed or an element of the drawing gets too magnified, or is too far to the side. Sometimes, when under a dome, you can see images behind you. Sometimes the public is all facing the same direction, that’s fine, but at other times people are all facing the center of the space. For example, at one point, people have to look at two pathways and have to decide if you should take the path to the right or the one to the left. But as people are facing each other, in fact, for some people the path on the right is the one on the left, or such nonsense. Fortunately, a stage manager of a space had warned us, he was in Paris and told us: “Be careful, this image will not work.” So, I made a white arrow on the right-side panel, and a black arrow on the left-side panel, and then, we could say: “OK, you take the black arrow, or you take the white one.” So, there are lots of things like that which can vary.
Louis:
The next residency was 10 days at the Enghien-les-Bains “Centre des arts”.
Maxime:
The time spent in residency is super because it’s when you really discover what the others have been doing. Yovan rarely sent us the sounds he had prepared in advance, so I discovered them during the residencies. I bring most of my drawings, and I might take a tracing paper to redraw an element that’ll then be superimposed to the drawing. I come to the residency with my pencils in case something happens. I use Photoshop software to edit images in most cases, but sometimes I am obliged to do it by hand. When I show a drawing, there is generally not much feedback, everyone seems happy with it. But Delphine said to me once:
Delphine:
Yes, your drawing is fine, but in fact, it lacks flowers. You are a bit sad here, you should add some flowers.
Maxime:
OK, you’re right, I am with you, it doesn’t suit me but… you’re right, I’m going to add flowers.
Maxime:
So, I drew lots of flowers so as to be able to take them one by one and afterwards integrate them into the drawing. And it’s better, a lot better, however it took me a while but… Now that we are almost at the end of it, I’ve got a list of alterations like that to be done on different drawings, where I need to add flowers, to remove some trees, that sort of thing.
Once the performance starts, I haven’t got much to do, because my drawings are already done, it’s Louis who is in charge of the animation. So roughly speaking, I’m in charge of the public participation part (people who are going to draw and all that), but I can also take care of the lighting. We did run through the piece together, someone helped me, she said: “You see, there, you turn it on, there you turn it off.” It had to make sense in terms of the story and so the storyteller was sometimes in the foreground, because she should be enhanced in front of the drawings; at other times, on the contrary, you have to turn her off so that the drawings can really take over all the viewer’s attention. That’s an interesting aspect that I discovered, I think it enriches the performance to be able to increase or decrease the presence of the storyteller.
32. 32. Public participation
Louis:
Then there was of the interaction with the audience that was important, how to use what already exists, what you’ve already mastered, in order to have the public participate. And so, it was basic, it wasn’t just for them to do things like creating the set, but to really pass on ideas through drawing. In the Live Drawing, you ask people questions, so as to provide them with subject matters for drawing, and then they do it. And in fact, we’ve found that to get people to start drawing, you have to be very simple, then afterwards, you can go super far, and they follow you, and produce incredible things. When I was in the process of creating the “Tale”, I always thought that the Live Drawing events could help me to find ways of involving the public in the tale, for example by proposing drawing themes such as: how do you see the transport of the future, how do you see things?
Maxime:
There is the question of the wall that exists between the scene and the public and how we can try to partially break it. In our case, I have the impression that the wall does not exist, but I realize that a small filter remains, a transparency paper, something in between, anyway there is a screen. When we started to experiment with digital applications, we saw a lot of things that depended on a single remote control, you had queues of 50 people waiting to access the technological tool. We thought Live Drawing was a good idea because this time it was really participatory, it was everyone doing things at the same time. So, on the one hand, we still had a thin wall, since we used telephones, but at least the thing was accessible to all. We pushed that idea because that’s what the festivals expected of us. They told us: “What we liked about it is the fact that everyone is doing things at the same time, last year we had 50 people waiting to access things, it was very frustrating for everybody.” So, we thought: “Ah! Banco!” There is still a limit because it’s anonymous: the people draw, and they can sit on a sofa, drawing in their own corner, or drawing eventually for the screen on the wall in Live Drawing, making drawings that aren’t interesting, that we feel obliged to delete without knowing who did it. By and large, that way, we break the wall since everyone is proactive in the work, and at the same time there’s still a bit of a filter in the sense that people are anonymous, and so, not completely assuming responsibility for their acts. And at the same time, that’s what freed them too, as I said to them: “Let’s go, in any case if you are going to do a rotten drawing, no one will know that’s you who did it, you’ll not have to show it to your son next to you, he won’t know, and at least you’ll have tried.”
Louis:
Concerning public participation and Live Drawing, I went back and forth with Maxime Touroute and Rémi Dupanloup. In the meantime, we did another project called “La Bulle du personnel” (the staff bubble), which was an institutional project for a hospital where we wanted to make a wall of interactive postcards. So, we spent a lot of time working on that idea of postcard. Maxime and Rémi who developed this project, used Live Drawing, and added new elements within it, in particular the possibility of inserting a text. So, I thought: “Yes, it would be very interesting if people could write instead of just using the Live Drawing.” I have adapted my desires for public participation according to the tools available to me. I couldn’t change, starting from scrap, because I had too many constraints, but all the same, I succeeded in getting people to write texts on basic things, notably on the big laws of the future.
Delphine:
I don’t feel far removed from the people in the audience because, after all, I ask them their advice. I feel the presence of the public, I know who is there. Because we help them to connect, we ask them if they are comfortably seated. Then, when I ask them their advice whether we should take the path on the right or the one on the left, I often take the time to say: “Do you all agree? Anyone disagree?” With almost no visible effort, I want to weave this relationship.
Louis:
The aim of this project isn’t necessarily centered on getting the public participating as such, but on projecting them into a desirable future and getting them to reflect on it. And to get them thinking about it, I propose they participate during the performance to engage them in this process. To achieve this, I use a system of gradually increasing participation:
- Before the beginning of the performance, they draw stars on their smartphone to introduce them to the situation.
- Then, they see their own stars appear on the wall, so they understand that what they’re doing with their phone is going to play a role in the story.
- Next, I have them draw the rain, it’s the same principle, but here they see that their image is animated and interacting with the plot.
- And then, they choose a pathway, so now, they are really participating by saying yes or no, a simple choice that will determine the evolution of the story.
- And after that, we ask them questions live, for example saying to them: “Here we are, in the world of the future, what do we do about people who don’t respect the rules?” Here you’re already starting to have a more in-depth interaction, and above all, this will make them think about potential conflicts, like how to behave in the future regarding someone who doesn’t respect the rules, how it might happen in a desirable future (we make this clear again and again) especially when we are in presence of students who want to hang people.
- Then, after the Great Council, they have to write the laws – this is what was closest to my heart and that’s what I try to preserve – we ask them to write a law that could today help us to achieve this desirable future.
Maxime:
With the “Tale of the Common Future”, we went a little further by asking people to participate in a real debate, by addressing the audience directly saying: “Here, what do we do, how should we continue the story, go ahead and propose something to us.” The time is quite structured in the sense that there is a period when the audience has to assimilate what the story is about, then there are open times where they’re on their anonymous telephones, and there is at least one period where we even turn the lights bock in the hall on to have a debate. This means that the separating wall between the scene and the public constantly goes up and down, there are several layers, but you can’t say that it’s completely removed.
Louis :
And I think that the Great Council, when we explain Biocracy, and when we get them involved, that’s really at the heart of what I wanted to do. In effect, we could do more, and we could do it differently, but in any case, I think that if they manage to think of a law within the framework of our present democratic society, in France, if you can imagine finding a law to make the world better, it means that you’re not going to have a violent revolution, but rather a more benevolent revolution. That’s really something that motivates me, and I want to show people that the system has certainly its faults, but solutions can be found within this system allowing us to succeed in evolving in a positive manner.
Delphine:
Even if the smartphone is bait for teenagers, because when we say to the kids they’re going to be able to draw on their phone, they say: “Ah! Really?”, they want to go and see the performance. Amazing! But in fact, they don’t do much on it, they draw the rain. At the end of the Nantes performance, a lady came to me and told me: “Hey! It’s a bit like cheating, your use of the phones, it’s a bit like trying to catch young people, because nobody chooses anything in your story.” I said “yes,” because I wasn’t going to contradict her, she’d seen it all.
Maxime:
We have to be careful about how we communicate our spectacle, because if we over-sell the participatory side, rather than the storytelling, the audience might be disappointed. At the beginning we sold the spectacle a bit by saying: “It’s a video game, you are active in shaping the story” and all that. I don’t know, it seems that it’s not a video game, where people at any moment take a joystick and move things around. We thought we mustn’t advertise that idea too much, because the people might be disappointed, we’ll sell them something that’s not representing what we’re doing. When we start a creation, you have a lot of ambitions, and once you’ve created something, you need to realize that in spite of liking what you have done, it does not correspond to the original ambition. You need to rewrite it to match what you want to do. So, we’ve been working a lot on this participatory side of things, but now it’s more just one of the ingredients, rather than the founding element of the spectacle.
On the question of a possible contradiction in the relationships with the audience between the intimate nature of storytelling and the technologies used in the performance, what’s interesting is to really tackle the problem in reverse order. In the call for Immersive projects, a lot of applicants submitted things based on technologies, their lines of thought didn’t really leave the computer. The fact of introducing a tale meant bringing an archaic element into the extremely technological world of digital arts. We proposed something non-technological, and it’s the same for the drawings which are done by hand. So, it’s not so much that we’ve “digitalized” the tale and the drawings, but it’s more that we’ve made the digital arts more human. In any case, I wasn’t expecting that, but the people who supported us said: “That’s what we appreciated in your application, it’s the fact that you bring together universes that we didn’t think could cohabit.” It was Louis’ intuition to update the digital arts by showing that they can be applied in so many different ways. It’s true that in the “Tale of a Common Future,” we are in a tension, because we want to tell a story and at the same time, we want to get the audience participating. So, it’s a delicate balance to achieve, it’s super sensitive. There’s a balance where we could perhaps open up the public participation more, and at the same time, once we have decided to have a story, you necessarily go more or less from point A to point B, where in any case you don’t have 10,000 entries. It closes a bit the question of participation.
33. The artistic and cultural education residency at Hennebont. Louis, Delphine and Yovan.
Louis :
Another form of participation was experimented with the Hennebont (Brittany) residency in schools, it was a EAC, “Education Artistique et Culturelle – Affaires Culturelles” (Artistic and Cultural Education – Cultural Affairs), [33] which lasted ten days in primary and secondary schools. We both worked almost eight hours a day during this period in many different classes. Public participation took another form of temporality: with the “Tale of the Common Future,” the public is only present for an hour, so it’s clear that people potentially will have less time to reflect than the primary and secondary school students, who work with this artistic project during one year, who are also supervised by the teachers who speak about it before I arrive. It means that when it’s well done, as in Hennebont, when our arrival. If it’s well done, as in Hennebont, they will have spent already four months of classes to reflect on the subject in different courses, in any case in visual arts. For four months they think about it, and then, I add another layer. I ask the students: “What would you like in the future concerning your habitat, what would you like as transportation, as the means of moving about?” Then I tell them, “We’ve thought about that,” and I show some elements of the Tale of the future, saying: “Well, we thought that it should be like this or that, but you, how do you see it?” And in general, it obviously raises their thinking, because you show something upon which they can reflect. The two situations of participation, performing in front of an audience and teaching in school, are just as important to me. Maybe the students in school think about it more, but it’s really a question of timing.
Delphine:
We did that residency in Hennebont with primary and secondary schools, they’d been drawing things that were then projected during the performance. To link all this to our spectacle, I briefly summarize the story of the performance we’re going to present them. In any case, at the beginning, there’s a general presentation by Louis and me.
Scene 1: Delphine and Louis. Presentation for the students.
Louis:
Here you are, we have a performance called “Tale of a Common Future.”
Delphine:
We imagine a future that will be desirable, na-na-na-na…
Louis:
You are going to work on storytelling with Delphine, then you will do digital work with me.
Delphine:
After that, both of us, we decide, depending on the situations and on the classes, our line, our objective, what we expect from them to do at the end of the day: do we want them to tell a story, or to produce something?
Louis:
With the SES classes (Economic and Social Sciences classes) I worked on the organization modes for future collective decision making, what economic models, what types of commercial and diplomatic exchanges between communities, what types of work and employment. In all my interventions, I speak of how people will live, in what kind of habitat in the future (especially with the youngest students), how they’ll get around, how they’ll be transported from one place to another. I am interested in Artificial Intelligence, so I spoke quite a bit about images generated by AI, which wasn’t really related to the Tale project, but which gave me a kick at that moment.
Delphine:
With one of the classes, we produced court cases. They were in small groups, they could use their phone, not to go where they usually go, but to go to research tools looking for court cases. So, you needed a victim, a culprit, and a trial, a cause. There some very well dressed were girls who came for the case to sue Zara, H&M and ASOS, great! I said to them: “You can tell all your friends”. They found out (and I learned that from them) that it was the Uighurs in China who make all these fashion clothes in extreme poverty, and everybody here buys them. “Me, you see, I buy clothes on Vinted and there’s loads of clothes to buy, amazing! [Muttered:] In fact everyone buys their clothes there. [Normal voice:] It’s very cheap”. So, they’ve discovered that, and I think it’s great that kids in small groups search on their phones, because it’s a tool they have at all times. All of them have a phone, when we say: “Take your phone out”, not one of them says: “But I don’t have a phone.” They never went to search this kind of things on their phones, they are just on social networks, they are not going to use it for anything else.
Louis:
At certain moments we would be together, Delphine and me, in front of a class, but most of the time we were alone. We had very short interventions, the longest ones lasted three hours. I was going back and forth: I stayed for a week and went back to Lyon, six hours by train, then I went back there for two days during which we did five performances, a crazy marathon. Yovan joined us at that point. During these performances, I included all the drawings the students had made.
Delphine:
Artistic education is very interesting to me. With the primary school children, all I did was to tell them stories, because that’s what they wanted. I tried to take the basic features of the spectacle. They did also some drawings, they love drawings. In fact, they are not told stories very often. I started by asking them: “If you had to make big court cases for making a better world tomorrow, what would they be? What can you imagine?”
Louis:
The students had essentially to draw things. The teachers had worked very hard on the whole thing, on the avatars of the future, their habitat, they already started to describe their huts, their things, etc. So, the students drew their habitat of the future, their characters of the future, etc., and I integrated them into Maxime’s drawings. This was an enormous amount of work! I’ll never do that again! It took me ten hours of clipping, I don’t know how many thousands of drawings, it was unbearable. Well, “unbearable,” it wasn’t unbearable, but it really exhausted me. Afterwards, it enabled me to recalibrate my interventions, by saying to myself: “Ah! only one drawing per class!”.
Delphine:
So, we had this whole discussion about the death penalty, it was terrible! They were all for the death penalty. It’s complicated, isn’t it! So, we spent a whole session discussing that. Nowadays, you don’t talk about the death penalty any more at school, the teachers told me that they didn’t do that anymore. Me, at school, I got a lot of flak about the death penalty. We talked a lot about it, we read texts, “na-na-na-na-na-na”, Victor Hugo, “ta-ta-ti ta-ta-ta”. Now, you don’t talk about the death penalty, so the kids listen to television programs.
Scene 2: in the classroom with Delphine.
Student 1:
I saw on television, there was a guy who said that a girl had been raped, and that he, the culprit, should be hanged.
Student 2:
He’s right.
Student 3:
Yes, he’s right.
Other students:
He’s right!
Student 4:
Some are going to jail, it’s useless, they are too happy in jail.
Delphine:
Ah! how do you know that he is happy in jail? Have you been to jail?
Student 4:
No, but I mean, in jail he has food, beverages, shelter.
Delphine:
And you, what if you were accused of raping someone, but it wasn’t you who did it, but everyone says that it was you, and you went to prison?
Student 4:
Oh, no! not me, it couldn’t happen to me!
Delphine:
Oh! Yeah?
Student 4:
No.
Delphine:
It can’t happen to you, it only happens to other people!
Student 5:
It’s no big deal if it happens to others.
Delphine:
At the same time, the teachers afterwards told me that it was actually good to talk about it, because it’s something they keep to themselves. They don’t say anything to anyone, they’re sure of themselves, they’re certain of their little conceptions. So, as a result of discussing it, it gets things moving. It is difficult to tackle this, because you must not judge what they say either, it’s an open forum, a space where you are free to speak. And so, there are some gems in what is said, like: “No, but they should stop at the iPhone X, and after that they should stop making them.” I said: “Yes, OK!”
The fact that I didn’t like high school, that I was on the margins, means that I don’t have any a priori ideas about the students. It’s almost those at the margin that sometimes I find the most interesting. Because I don’t have a great self-esteem, I don’t have prejudgments as sometimes intellectuals do with respect to the ones who can’t make it. And I want to keep it that way. What I got from the circus, is the position of the body: first of all, we have to sit down, to put our feet down on the floor, we all have the backs straight and we are there all together. We’re not like that [she shows a slumped body position], if anyone really wants to stay like that, no big deal. But I mean, we are here, present with our body, and then there’s the work on breathing, on keeping straight, of sending what you want to say where you want to say it – [whispered] because if you talk like that, no-one understands anything – [normal voice] and this is also useful for them at school when they have their oral exam, they’ll know how to speak. There is a discussion, at first you just say their first name, and then ask if any of them are very embarrassed to speak in public. Because some are hyper embarrassed to speak. And then there are those who aren’t at all embarrassed, they should not be allowed to talk all the time, and have the others saying nothing, you have to manage that aspect, and then set some rules. From the onset, I set rules: don’t make fun of anyone here, you have the right to say whatever you wish, it will not go out of the classroom, it will stay between us. You can discuss things, but you are not there to say anything out of the blue, it’s a space of freedom, you respect others, no mockery, I can’t bear it. It was the circus that brought me this attitude that involves a lot of bodywork, and also, storytelling where working the body is related to speaking. And then I tell them stories and ask them what they think. Obviously, I’m not going to tell the same stories to teenagers as to primary school children.
We worked with the partners, the teachers. For example, we worked with a Spanish teacher. We had the students in a circle, and we looked for words in Spanish to imagine for example the Propel Stretch. So, I explained to them what it was, and then they started looking for words in the dictionary, they had a ball. I don’t know any Spanish, so they tried to pronounce things and then I would say: “How do you say that? This one I don’t know.” The kids were trying to say it. And the teacher said to me: “The Spanish classes have never been as beneficial as they were today.” Because it was another way to do it, they had to look for a vocabulary for future habitats in Spanish. Everything is possible, in fact.
Maxime:
There was a residency at Hennebont with high school students, I wasn’t there, so I think that must have had an influence on the writing, because Louis came back and told me: “They came up with some incredible ideas, it gave us many leads.” So, it may have orientated the story a little bit, but also, they made a lot of drawings. And this didn’t match up with my practice, because you have to remember that drawing is a solitary practice, that is done prior to being able to work with others. I don’t think that musicians are as solitary because there are the rehearsal times for rehearsals; it’s true, there’s personal time for practicing, but I think that the something collective happens more often. I work on my own before bringing new building blocks to the collective team.
34. The residencies (continued): Paris, Nantes.
Louis:
The next residency was in Paris, at the Cité des Sciences. It was a five-day residency, and I only made a plan for the first day:
9h. am: Installation
10h.: Internet test
11h.: Video test
Noon: Lighting test
1h. pm: Lunch
…
Oh! yes, then there was Emilie Baillard, who is a stage director; I asked her to take an external look at Delphine’s movements on stage. She came and, in the end, we realized that a complete residency would have been necessary, and she was only there only for one day with us, while we were doing many other things. In Paris we added roughly between three and four minutes more.
Scène Scene 1: Delphine and Louis
Louis:
Well! we’ve got to move on, hop!
Delphine:
Yes, let’s go.
Louis:
Now, we have to get a bit moving, because it’s hot right now, we haven’t managed to make much headway since the last time, we’ve got to finish the story for Nantes. It’s our last residency as part of the Call for immersive projects AADN.
Delphine:
We could meet before going to Nantes.
Louis:
So, we should meet for two more two-day writing residencies in Lyon.
Delphine:
I can come to Lyon, since I am taking some classes. We can try to write the end of the story.
Louis:
In Nantes, Yovan, Delphine and I are present all the time. And there, the days weren’t very precisely organized, although as usual I’d drawn up a more or less complete schedule. And there we effectively run through the entire tale from beginning to end, because we arrived at the end of it. The two last days we have two public presentations, on Thursday evening and Friday evening, presenting the spectacle in its entirety even if we still are missing some drawings, even if Delphine reads her text. Maybe I didn’t mention this up to now – I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say it now – but what needs emphasizing is the enormous amount of work Delphine has done. In Nantes, the work days didn’t end at 6 p.m., they ended much later in the evening. Many times, Delphine and Yovan are both working together while I’m struggling with the drawings, so, I don’t have time to do things with them. What’s really great about Yovan, as a musician, is that he’s got a sense of rhythm, so he can say to Delphine:
There, you see when I play this, you have to say that.
Louis:
He goes back-and-forth a lot with Delphine, a lot of times they have to coordinate their actions:
Ah! no, that’s it! Exactly!
Louis:
And so, they go through the piece together. During the rehearsals, I often work on drawings that have nothing to do with what they are doing. Often, I work alone, many times when I have to adjust things, it doesn’t work, I redo it, it doesn’t work, I redo it… it doesn’t work! After a while finally it does work. From time to time, I call Maxime. And I have also to take care of all the rest. I do the animation of the drawings, the video, all the public participation part, I fix each time what’s going to appear on the smartphones, what’s going to appear on the screen, all the changes it implies, because it continuously changes as it goes along, you have to change the questions addressed to the audience, you have to change the interface, etc. There are many things to change while it’s going on with Live Drawing that I now know very well. And I’m also in charge of lighting. That’s a lot of things to do, I’m in charge of the technical side, I have also to take care of Yovan’s sound when something doesn’t work. Well, he looks at things, he does things, but generally it’s me who gets my hands dirty.
Yovan:
Louis is also helping out, otherwise it wouldn’t work. Now we know that for such a performance, you need someone permanently in charge of these technical aspects of sound and music, basically it’s not too much to ask. In this project, there were lots of things to be learned at the same time, frankly, that’s what was interesting to me. Each time you say to yourself: “Ah! there, it didn’t work!”, there is that big challenge. It takes one day to fix things and then you get back to the rhythm of the performance. In fact, every time, you have to familiarize yourself with the place, once you are comfortable in that place, that you have your sound balance, everything will fly.
Louis:
And at the end I find myself alone to de-install, while Yovan repacked his gear, it’s for me to put things back in order, but I’m used to it, it’s the role of the stage manager at the beginning and at the end, after everyone’s gone.
Yovan:
We really worked together as a trio because the story was still being written as we went along, it wasn’t a situation like: “So, here we are, I’ve written this text, now deal with it.” At the beginning, I proceeded in this manner with Delphine’s text, by composing the music to it. This was a good way to go, but after a while it was necessary to meet. The residencies were the occasion to work together, especially in Nantes where the text wasn’t completely written yet. Delphine didn’t send me anything prior to that residency because Louis had some ideas, but they had to agree together on what was really going to happen. Louis isn’t a writer, he’s not an author, but he was responsible for the concept of the spectacle, and he needed Delphine to put the story into words. And since I had also not decided on the music, I said: “I prefer to compose along with you.” So, for the end of the piece, I worked with them when we were in Nantes, making the noise effects with them. And when they’d ask me: “Look, right here, it would be good to have a moment of music,” I knew quickly how to produce something that would be rewritten later at home. That way, we were able to get well acquainted with each other. Louis’ project was very ambitious from the start, because he had a lot of ideas that you had to sort out. Now that we know each other, we know what works effectively, and for a possible next project, we will know what not to do, it’ll save time.
Louis:
So, we’re super happy at the end of the Nantes residency, because we succeeded in putting something together, and we’re very happy with the public feedback.
Scene 2: after the performance in Nantes
Delphine, Louis, Amandine’s friend, someone from the public
A person from the public:
I am super happy to have come because it makes us to want to do things, we can see that it’s possible to change things and gives us the incentive to do it.
Louis:
That’s exactly what I wanted, so I’m very happy.
Amandine’s friend:
It was super. I tried to get colleagues from work to come along to the performance, but they thought it was too ecologist.
Delphine:
Oh! well, how do they know it’s an eco-thing?
Amandine’s friend:
You’ve seen the publicity?
Delphine:
I’m the one who wrote the publicity notice.
Louis:
Here is the text: “This spectacle is a participatory journey into a desirable future, an immersive tale, with a storyteller, with the audience contributing to the story with digital tools, discussions, and reflections. This work creates a space conductive to addressing social issues that concern us today: injustice, ecology, and war.”
Delphine:
If only war had been mentioned, they might have come! I don’t think the publicity notice is so easy to write.
Amandine’s friend:
For someone who is not ecologist, yes, it doesn’t seem eco, but for someone who isn’t…
Delphine:
All right. At the same time, I don’t understand how today, in our time, you can’t be concerned by ecology. I don’t understand that you can say you don’t give a damn about it! I’m appalled by people who say “Oh! another ecologist thing!” Have you seen how we live? Have you seen what about to fall on our heads? So, do you have children? Even if you don’t have children! You love animals? You love flowers? How can you be so indifferent to that? It seems really complicated, it seems to me crazy. And if they think it’s leftist, I’ve been anarchist for a long time, so OK, I’m in a left-wing spectacle. Well, it’s true that it’s the rich people who pollute the most the earth! Delusions of luxury, there! And the more you dig, the more you… Concerning bees, the lobbyists present falsified arguments: “No, no, no, pesticides are not at all bad for bees, no worries.” Everyone knows it’s false, that it’s just a question of dough, and in fact they continue to use pesticides against bees, they screw everything.
35. Ecology. Delphine.
Delphine:
Today, after all, I might be bourgeois in relation to what I was before, and maybe I’m not “all eco”. That’s clear. But I try to do what I can. It’s true, I think the very rich are on another level: it’s all about rocket competitions, huge boats, it’s everyday taking a plane. It stinks. I think that already you could do a little more, you could stop using the pesticides a little. You’d just do a bit, and that would be already quite a lot. I denounce Total during the performance. In Uganda and in Tanzania, it’s terrible, they screw everything up. Tanzania, it’s a paradise on earth, there are giraffes, elephants, “prrrrrroo, gray, grog, track, trock, pail.” Some people rebel, they are locked in the dark for six months. And Macron supports. And everyone supports that, BNP Paribas finances, come on but where’s the problem guys? It’s awful. It’s awful, but it’s going on. But there are people who denounce it, I learnt that from watching the television show “Investigation gizmo”: a blond girl, very short hair, doing Tintin investigations, I don’t know how to say that, is it written somewhere? [noises of page turning] In short, anyway, there’re are journalists who denounce the status quo, things are happening. I think things will change, at least I hope.
The problem is that the rich couldn’t care less. They want to continue to live in luxury and are so afraid of losing all their money. Why? It’s crazy. You’re not asking them to live on subsistence allowance, and go sweep the street pavements, as we’re asking the unemployed nowadays. Yeah, it’s true, I come from a very low-class background, I come from no-dough, maybe I have this empathy or this understanding of other people who don’t have that, because they were born into luxury and they don’t understand that if one day they don’t have that anymore, it still will be OK, it can be a beautiful life without all that. You almost want to give these people a hug: “It’s going to be all right, don’t worry!”
I’ve discovered some incredible architects, like Ferdinand Ludwig. We looked for examples of architecture, like vernacular architecture, it’s all premises that are built with trees and plants. I didn’t completely agree with this. Maxime and I talked a lot about it, because for me, if you make buildings with trees, they have to be rooted in the ground, and often with the buildings you see, the trees are in plant pots. As someone who loves trees and reads a lot, I know that trees communicate through their roots, so you miss it if you do that: they can’t communicate. The trees protect themselves from certain illnesses through the roots, by the mycelium, they send information if there are animals or insects attacking them. One tree communicates: “Quickly, protect yourself!” then, it dies, but not the ones next to it. So, I think it’s a pity to put them in pots. In any case, I think you will be obliged to put plants, vegetation in cities, otherwise too many people will die. It’s obvious.
36. Conclusion
Louis:
My team was formed by people who are actually good at what they do, otherwise I wouldn’t have worked with them. So, from there, if they propose something, I assume that it’s good, that they know better than I do what’s good, because that’s their job. It’s the same with Yovan, I don’t give him a hard time about the music, I am not going to tell him what to do… Oh! yes anyway, I do give him a bit of a hard time!
Yovan:
In this project, the people I work with had no strong requirements and trusted me, they let me be free to develop my own things. It allowed me to express myself and continue to evolve in that way. I could adapt the music to different situations, if it was too long or too short, I could decide what was working and what was not Then, sometimes, Louis and I didn’t agree, he would say: “Well, here I’d like to have more of that, you should play that live,” or things like that. But it was always expressed in order to find a common ground between us.
Louis:
I give them all a bit of a hard time, that’s kind of my role. I give my opinion, and then they follow my advice or not at all. Basically, I give the big directions. But overall, I leave them 100% free.
Maxime:
When I’m drawing, I still have that idea of going a bit against my architectural practice (and its long-time established nature). There’s maybe one, two or three sketches in black and white, which take I’d say two minutes to do, and then, when I hold one, I do a color sketch in maybe five minutes, and then, in general, I rarely go back to do it again. As I know that I have limited time, I don’t allow myself to do too much research. Fairly quickly, I say to myself: “Now, I have got a lot of drawings to do, let’s get on with it” and I like this sense of being instinctive. Not much tergiversations but going instinctively.
Yovan:
What I retain from the collective work is that even the negative makes you learn things. It’s pulling your hair at certain moments, but it was interesting in any case to work in a planetarium and all that. I rarely visited these kind of places, you don’t go there every day, I’m speaking for myself, but it’s interesting to see that they are very well equipped for sound and music (also visually speaking). And as a result, there’s a lot to be done, especially with digital arts, which is actually a fairly new practice. I have a good number of friends who are getting into digital arts, there’s so much going on with that. The phenomenon goes beyond the performances of digital artists, it’s something that’s developing nowadays in concerts of electronic music, even in rock and rap concerts, you are into textures, lighting, etc. I learned that in order to put together a performance that might last fifteen minutes, it’s going to be a lot of work. On the other hand, I think that the ideal would have been to have a maximum of things already laid down before the first residency, particularly in the writing of the story, so that afterwards, once we’re in the creative stage, we could go into as much detail as possible in rehearsals and into trimming things. We had not enough time to do that in relation to what was not going well, so as to air out the spectacle. Well, this is going to be useful for next time, but it was full of discoveries, and at the same time, discoveries of what could be better, but you have that in all projects in any case. So, frankly, for the most part there’s some positive aspects in every sense, and now here’s the spectacle, and we are hoping that it will go a bit on tour, so that we can continue to fine-tune it.
Delphine :
These are wonderful encounters, I‘m happy to have met all three of them. It was cool to be with them, it’s a team that really functions well. It’s particularly nice to be with them, because it’s not always certain that you’ll be able to work with anyone, that’s true, it’s not always that simple. Here we all get on really well, even at the level of creative collaboration.
I’ve now read my notes, it makes me laugh, this is not at all what I would say today. It’s funny.
The “Tale of a Common Future” was premiered on June 18, 2023, at the Centre des Arts in Enghien-les-Bains near Paris.
TheTale for a Common Future chooses to collectively explore a desirable future and the ways to achieve it. This is a participatory spectacle, with the audience using their smartphones and voices to take part in the story in the manner of a video game. The story is constructed as a collective improvisation, in which each participant can at any moment make it deviate or fork, jostle it, increase it, divert it.
Co-production: AADN –Arts & Cultures Numériques (Digital Arts and Culture) in Lyon, Vaulx-en-Velin Planetarium, Paris Planetarium of the “Cité des sciences et de l’industrie”, Stereolux, Nantes Planetarium, association Antipodes, “Pays d’Art et d’Histoire” between Cluny and Tournus.
With the support from the “Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée” and SACEM. cda95.fr/fr
1. Marie-France Marbach is a storyteller, artistic director of the festival Contes Givrés, and glottis-trotter. Geo Jourdain is the president founder of the association Antipodes and an idea agitator. The Association Antipodes is directed by Geo Jourdain and Marie-France Marbach and is located in Saint-Marcelin-de-Cray (Burgundy). https://www.association-antipodes.fr
2. “François Pin is back in his role as president of the association La Carrière de Normandoux, where it all began, on the site he acquired on a whim in 2004 in Tercé, 20 km from Poitiers.” lejdd.fr/Culture/L-etonnante-carriere-de-Monsieur-Pin-
3. IRFA-Bourgogne is a training organization in existence in the Bourgogne Franche-Comté region for 35 years.
4. L’Atelier du Coin, in Montceau-les-Mines, is an insertion workshop work site. atelierducoin.org
5. Gus Circus of Saint Vallier, Fjep, circus school. koifaire.com
6. BIAC diploma: Brevet d’Initiation aux Arts du Cirque (Brevet for the Initiation to Circus Arts) a French diploma for teaching circus arts. See ffec.asso.fr
7. Nicole Durot. See « La Bulle verte »: in 2005, Nicole Durot created La Bulle verte, a circus school for valid and handicapped children and adults. labulleverte.com
8. It’s Laurent Fréchuret. The words that are attributed here to him are fictional. Laurent Fréchuret
10. Les Contes Givrés is a festival organised by the association Antipodes. association-antipodes.fr
11. In France, the architects who are the masters of the work are responsible for any damages to the building’s solidity or who render improper to its usage destination for ten years following the completion of the work. architectes.org
12. Ensemble Aleph, a contemporary music group based in Paris that exited from 1983 through 2022. ensemblealeph.com
13. Mapping: The video mapping is a visual animation projected on relief structures. fr.wikipedia.org
14. Maxime Touroute : maximetouroute.github.io
15. Theatre C2 at Torcy in Saône-et-Loire. 71210torcy.fr
16. Jacques Prévert, « L’Autruche », Contes pour enfants pas sages, , Illustrations by Laurent Moreau, Paris : Gallimard-jeunesse – Folio Cadet, les classiques N°8, 2018. artpoetique.fr
17. Débruit (Xavier Thomas): limitrophe-production.fr
18. « « KoKoKo! is a project born out of a film documenting the contemporary underground Kinshasa scene » limitrophe-production.fr
19. Julien Lagrange, guitarist, teaches guitar and workshop for handicap students at the EMDT of Cluny and vicinity (Saône-et-Loire). enclunisois.fr
20. Google : “With the 7.1 sound format, a rear center channel is generated in addition to these channels and distributed over two other speakers (called rear centers). This channel, coded in the stereo effects channels, makes it easier to localize effects and music signals directly behind the seated position.” google.com
21. The Lablab is an artistic laboratory, which offers a research and creative space completely equipped for new audiovisual, immersive and interactive experiences. polepixel.fr
22. AADN (Arts & Cultures Numériques) Digital arts and culture association, created in Lyon in 2004, it carries artistic and cultural projects that shake up the imaginary landscape and arouse the desire of founding a sensible, solidary, and responsible post-digital society. Through experimentation and cooperation, it strives to build a new culture of being-together. aadn.org
23. Metaverse: The metaverse is a virtual world where humans, as avatars, interact with each other in a three-dimensional space that mimics reality. The metaverse is online, but it’s also three-dimensional and changeable. The Metaverse is the spatialized Net of the future. wikipedia.org
24. Baptiste Morizot is a French philosopher who teaches at the Aix-Marseille University. His research is on the relationships between humans and the rest of the living world. wikipedia.org
25. In French, Camille can be both the first name of a girl or of a boy.
26. Camille de Toledo is a French essayist and writer living in Berlin. He is a visual and video artist, and teaches at the ENSAV (La Cambre) in Brussel. wikipedia.org
27. Medlay is a hybrid media from concept for crafting a multimedia artefact to narrate a story and/or communicate an idea on the Web ranbureand.github.io
28. Resolume Wire is a modular node-based patching environment to create effects, mixers and video generators. resolume.com
29. Jacques Puech is a singer and cabrette player of traditional music from Massif Central in France, see La Novia. la-novia.fr
30. Stems : « What we call “Stems” are the different source tracks in your production project, grouped by sections. loreille.com
31. Notion is a productivity and note-taking web application developed by Notion Labs, Inc. It is an online only organizational tool on many different operating systems, with options for both free and paid subscriptions. It is based in San Francisco, California, United States. Wikipédia en.wikipedia.org
32. Chevagny Passions : an art festival that takes place every year at Chevagny-sur-Guye (Saône-et-Loire). fr.wikipedia.org
33. EAC, Ministry of Culture: “The aim of artistic and cultural education (EAC) is to encourage the participation of all children and young people in artistic and cultural life, through the acquisition of knowledge, a direct relationship with works of art, encounters with artists and cultural professionals, and artistic or cultural practice.” » culture.gouv.fr
Debate (English version)
Debate on Artistic Research
Cefedem Rhône-Alpes & PAALabRes Collective
November 2, 2015
Contents:
Introduction
Definition of Research
The Institutions of Research, The Institution of Research
The Models of Research in Tension
1. Relationships to other Disciplinary Fields
2. Theory and Practice
3. The Status of the Written Text
Artistic Research – Avenues to Reflect
1. Research through the Elaboration of the Artistic Act
2. Alternative Research Models
3. Administrative Obstacles
4. The Question of Research Spaces and Publications
1. Research before the Doctorate
2. Research before and outside Higher Education
3. Research outside the Norms
Post-scriptum to the debate session: PaaLabRes, debate on “Artistic Research”
Foreword
On November 2, 2015, the Study Center of the Cefedem Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes[1] and the Collective PaaLabRes[2] organized a discussion session on questions related to artistic research. The theme of the imaginative and dynamic evening, was based on two questions: how to define, conceive, develop artistic research? And why?
Two texts were proposed to the participants before the debate: a) a summary in French of the book by Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas, The Artistic Turn, A Manifesto (CRCIM, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium, distributed by Leuven University Press, 2000); b) Jean-Charles François, “La question de la recherché artistique dans le cadre de l’enseignement supérieur musical” (“The Question of Artistic Research in Higher Music Education”), November 2014 (unpublished).
Were present in the debate:
Jean-Louis Baillard, writer, director of research at the School of Architecture in Saint-Etienne.
Sophie Blandeau, collective Polycarpe.
Samuel Chagnard, musician, teaches at the Cefedem AuRA, member of PaaLabRes.
Marion Chavet, visual artist.
Dominique Clément, clarinetist, composer, adjunct director of the Cefedem AuRA.
Jean-Charles François, percussionist, composer, retired director of the Cefedem AuRA and member of PaaLabRes.
Hélène Gonon, lecturer in Educational Sciences at the Cefedem AuRA.
Laurent Grappe, electro-acoustic musician, member of PaaLabRes.
Aurélien Joly,jazz musician and improvisator.
François Journet, administrator of the Cefedem AuRA.
Gilles Laval, musician, director of the Rock department at the ENM of Villeurbanne and member of PaaLabRes.
Noémi Lefebvre, in charge of the Study Center at the Cefedem AuRA, writer and researcher in Political Sciences, member ofe PaaLabRes.
Valérie Louis, lecturer in Educational Sciences at the CNSMD of Lyon, formerly Freinet primary teacher.
Ralph Marcon, in charge of the Documentation Center at the Cefedem AuRA.
Jacques Moreau, pianist, Director of the Cefedem AuRA.
Pascal Pariaud, musician, clarinet teacher at the ENM of Villeurbanne and member of PaaLabRes.
Didier Renard, professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Lyon, director of a laboratory at the CNRS.
Eddy Schepens, researcher in Educational Sciences, formerly adjunct director of Cefedem AuRA, chief editor of Enseigner la Musique.
Nicolas Sidoroff, musician, teaches at the Cefedem AuRA and member of PaaLaBbRes
Gérald Venturi, musician, saxophone teacher at the ENM of Villeurbanne, member of PaaLabRes.
Introduction
The concert that serves only to concert, who does it concern? Concentrate! Because one centers the concert on the works served “in concert”, They have to be conserved in served concerts, they are serried in severe terms and serve only for the purpose of concerts. To serve works in concerts in front of consorts, serves to conserve, and to converse, but the conversation is already a concerted activity for those concerned, a concerting concern. The concerting concern serves to concentrate oneself on the concerts served to consorts, the concerting concern is the raison d’être of the concert, it serves in gathering consorts in concert of concepts more or less disconcerting. The concerting and disconcerting concern concentrates action and reflection. The concerting and disconcerting concern is the research on action and reflection. The concerting and disconcerting concern is the research on action and reflection about the concerting concert and object of concerting actions. The research is not concerned in conserving converts, but it conserves, it converses on the health of concerts served as concerting concern. The research without which there is no higher education, the research concerns us.[3]
In order to open up the debate, a certain number of questions were formulated by Noémi Lefebvre in the name of the Study Center of the Cefedem AuRA, and by Jean-Charles François in the name of PaaLabRes:
- Even if the European reform of higher education “LMD” gives a strong institutional framework, with injunctions made to conservatories and art schools to develop some research, the intention of this debate is to formulate the problems as if we were starting from nothing. Thus, two aspects of artistic research need to be distinguished: a) the real content of actions, what is happening within the given different groups and b) where can it be happening, to what extent are these actions allowed and recognized by institutions.
- It is therefore important in this debate to put forward the following questions: a) “who speaks” about artistic research today? b) “from where does one speak”, from which institutional context or from outside the institutions? And c) “in what circumstances does one speak” about it? Who has something to say about it? Artists? Political representatives?
- Another dimension of artistic research concerns the fact that many people who carry out artistic research do not speak about it, either because they do not feel the need to, or because they deliberately refuse to. Who are they exactly? Where do they work, these anonymous researchers? What are their objects? What are the ideas linked to their research acts?
In this first series of questions, a strong tension appears between on the one hand the institutional frameworks, what they allow and do not allow, and on the other hand the real topography of the actions realized here and there claiming the term of research, or also the more frequent number of actions that do not pretend to deserve such qualification:
- Is there then an obligation to develop artistic research as an answer to the requirements imposed by the European or national instances? Nothing would be more absurd than to simply obey the injunctions to conform to a single model of higher education, if the conditions are not fulfilled in a given discipline to create a meaningful context.
- The question of the different disciplinary fields is complicated by the fact that they are not stable entities, they constantly evolve. There is a tendency to consider the disciplinary fields as fixed objects. In these conditions of instability how does one contemplate the question of the signification? If it is possible to envision research as seeking to find sense in actions, the question arises of how to create meaning? How to highlight the meaning of the actions?
- There is no higher education in a determined field without the presence of a definition of research linked to that domain. Is it really the case? Is it necessary in the artistic domains? Symmetrical question: is it possible to contemplate research outside university study programs that lead to it?
- Artistic research is considered as concerning in the first instance the elaboration of artistic practices. The still dominant thought is that practice is separated from theory: practitioners do very well what they are doing, they do not have to think about what they do. Higher education is still divided in the mind between professional training on the one hand, and theoretical tracks on the other hand. Are the artists capable of a specific thought when they practice their art?
- Another strong representation maintains that only those who are placed as onlookers from outside a practice are able to analyze what is at stake in it. The practitioners tend to be blinded by their own objects. In what conditions could the arts practitioners have access to reflection on their own actions?
- Is artistic research an internal necessity for today’s artistic practices? Does the situation of the artist in society impose on whoever is practicing the arts a capacity to carry out systematic reflection?
- The question of temporality seems essential. During the 1970s, it is striking to note, musicians had time at hand: the public grants allowed the development of long term projects, the fundamental research was at the center of university activities. Do we have time today? Without a reasonable amount of time, has artistic research any sense?
- The question of the usefulness of research should be considered in an artistic context that strongly refuses to carry particular utilitarian purposes. What is the purpose of art? But above all what should be the purpose of artistic research? Here there is a subsidiary question: isn’t it a fact that the very notion of research is linked to the concepts of progress and modernity? Would artistic research be yet another way to measure the degree of innovation of a given practice?
In the text that follows, the totality of the persons present participates in the debate. The selected option is to not mention in the text the name of the speakers, and to classify what was said in well-identified chapters. The contradictions that are expressed from time to time in the text reflect a constructive debate respecting the point of view of each participant. The text has been established on the basis of the excellent note-taking by Jacques Moreau in collaboration with Nicolas Sidoroff and François Journet.
Definition of Research
To define the term research is difficult, and consequently even more difficult to define artistic research. Is it a question of any manifestation of a cerebral activity, or of what is well delineated by the framework determined by universities? In the course of elaborating curricula, it is easy to create education cells that can be qualified as “research”. Facing certain courses you think: “in this case it has definitively something to do with research”. We could refer to the doctoral program at the Lyon CNSMD (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse), exclusively modeled on the existing university model. Yet, it is possible to begin to reflect on the notion of research specific to the arts outside the higher education institutions. It is a matter of defining, in the framework of the internal aspects of artistic creation and of its transmission:
- What is artistic research?
- Who is concerned by it?
- How can this type of research exist in social environments?
- The places in which it makes sense.
- The ways by which it may succeed.
In summary, it is a matter of defining on what basis artistic research is capable of developing larger paradigms, which would justify its legitimacy within higher education. What is the breeding ground on which this legitimacy can be built? And incidentally what is happening in the universities?
The term “research” is perhaps too much loaded with precise references, linked to the professional status of researchers. It can be considered as a false nose for a posture that can be qualified as “reflexive”. The idea of the “reflective practitioner” seems to offer more democratic perspectives, allowing a great number of persons to find in it a framework less imposing than the one implied by the term “research”. This is a posture that anybody can assume as part of his/her activities. This idea is inspired from the work of the American philosopher John Dewey, around the practice of the enquiry that any citizen should be able to carry out in order to develop an awareness of the stakes inherent to a particular field of investigation. The reflexive posture would allow consideration of all the contributive approaches of the diverse artistic practices.
But there is something much more important than a precise definition of what exactly the terms of research or of reflexivity entail: it is the indispensable presence of places, of circumstances, of structures that gather people together, and the presence of production tools the nature of which is necessarily composite, hybrid. The criteria for defining the reflexive or research activities have to be determined after the fact. To start with the very meaning of what research could be seems an inauspicious way to give any result. The most important task is the capacity to assemble – cf. the winemakers’ assemblage or blending – people who are in a reflexive posture, but who work often in a great solitude. How to assemble them together?
Some years ago the French Ministry of Culture organized a conference on artistic research, inviting above all some philosophers, and a few art practitioners, scrupulously avoiding posing the question of teaching and learning the artistic things.[4] What were the criteria developed by these philosophers? It was above all question of confronting the ideas of one chapel in connection with those of other chapels. It did not give us viable tools to proceed further.
It is established that in order to find a place in the actual system of research, there is no other choice than to tackle questions, which in advance have already been resolved. This phenomenon should not be underestimated. To counter this, we should propose the idea of something existing, which is determined in the course of its elaboration. And it is also perhaps for this reason that, with the term of research – taken now in the sense of combat – it becomes important to affirm alternatives to practices that are instituted in some too peremptory manner.
The Research Institutions, the Institution of Research
Should we completely refuse to be situated outside the arbitrary impositions of the LMD process (Europe imposing Licence-Master-Doctorate on all Higher Education) and of its normative institutional injunctions, or on the contrary consider that it is an ideal occasion to tackle the issues of research in order to invent new situations? The Ministry of Culture tends to launch some watchwords without defining what they imply as possible directions to take. This gives an opportunity to take up the ideas in order to adapt them to situations going in a different direction than the intended one.
Two debates should be distinguished: on the one hand the institutional debate that concerns acknowledging activities as legitimate research, allowing to access grants. All institutions have to face the problems of recognition of research. Such debate has nothing to do with the one, on the other hand, which poses the question of the reflexive attitudes that one can have starting from one’s own practices. In the first case, in order for a research activity to be recognized, we are in presence of more and more violent criteria, over which the teachers-researchers have absolutely no control. In the second case, we find pockets of resistance that refuse the arbitrary injunctions of non-pertinent criteria, and then go on to seek alternative processes of gaining legitimacy. To stress the difference between these two debates seems absolutely essential. A book like the Artistic Turn, for example, is written by artists fighting to find a legitimate place in the university while preserving the specificities of their art. This book, however, is very preoccupied with the institutional rationalities for evaluating artistic research, and not enough with an intellectual content, which would be completely independent from them. When we read this book, it is necessary to make a keen distinction between these two positions.
One of the preoccupations of The Artistic Turn is to attempt to position artistic research in relation to the dominant model, which automatically assimilates research to hard sciences and to their criteria of truth. This reduces the reflection to a prebuilt modality, since artistic research has always to be placed within criteria that are elaborated elsewhere. It should be noted that a part of scientific research tries to be inspired by artistic experimental situations.[5] Bringing artistic research closer to that of social sciences, which also has to deal with subjective elements difficult to stabilize, seems a more propitious way to develop the understanding of many things in the domains proper to artistic activities.
Some despair is apparent today among those who work in French higher education. They deplore the recent development of savage evaluation rationales, centered perversely on research in quantitative terms (publications, participation in conferences, quotes in books, etc.), which does not at all go in the direction of an opening of research to the instability of results that cannot be predicted. Research, devoid of its intellectual qualitative content, becomes solely an instrument of normalization, in order to align universities on a single conception and above all in order to hierarchically compare them. The notion of excellence turns into submission to a certain number of injunctions dictated by centralizing policies. This is what allows funding appropriations to take place. Another important injunction concerns the requirement for research to be only occupied with what is considered as useful to society, notably in encouraging establishing privileged relationships with industry and the market place.
These approaches announce the programmed disappearance of Social Sciences and Humanities departments. A certain number of disciplines in the social sciences, literature and arts find themselves caught between the necessity to conform to criteria that are external to their essence and to constantly justify their usefulness to society, which considerably weakens them and directly threatens their existence. Consequently, there is a tendency today in universities to align research on the lowest intellectual educational level. The researchers are therefore strongly encouraged to turn their attention towards practical domains, but this has nothing to do evidently with artistic concerns.
The race for quantitative recognition in research produces also the recourse to “ready-made thinking” and to “ready-made evaluation”, which soon become the obliged pathways to which everybody has to conform and in which many participants find reassuring and comfortable situations. The association of domains that are deemed subjective, such as the arts, with scientific domains that are deemed objective, such as for example the neurosciences, suggests at the same time that research envisioned in this way contributes to the progress of humanity and that it allows the access to undeniable proofs. The scientific method falsely applied to the arts becomes an obligation without which nobody can pretend to claim legitimacy in research.
The injunctions coming from European instances carry with them many constraints, but they have also the merit to open new spaces. In architecture, the doctorate has been put in place only very recently, one does not know yet what it exactly entails. A Canadian attempted to describe what is a thesis in architecture. He studied forty theses and mapped them out according to the elements that orientated the research. This is the kind of approach that creates some openings towards the spaces of creation: how to create your own great book on architecture. On the condition to not fall into the elaboration of a between ourselves sub-culture, as it is often the case when the methods and the language have primacy over the contents. On the condition also to respect the small objects of research, as much as the ones with larger perspectives.
All the same, one has the impression that the race for control could well collapse on itself: with the increase in criterization rationales and a society going ever faster and faster in combining things and matters, have we not arrived at a point of rupture, at the end of a system? By definition, it will be more and more difficult to continue in the same register of normalization and controls, because the system in itself generates a capacity to get out from the boxes, to surpass the imposed frameworks. For reasons of efficiency, and the social issues raised by the system, it is difficult to imagine that the university can continue for a very long time in this way. Even if the technocratic imagination can make these absurd systems last for a very long time, it is conceivable that some dynamic reassessments are about to emerge inside and outside the institutions.
The Models of Research in Tension
1. Relationships to other Disciplinary Fields
Artistic research seems to make sense only in the perspectives in which art is not considered any more as autonomous in relation to the banality of its ordinary environment. To continue to consider art as preserved from the conditions in which it is produced (art for art’s sake), is an ideal that research cannot fulfill. In this posture, the artist does not need to devote attention to research, since this could threaten the purity of the creative act, research in this context should be considered as external to art, it should content itself with the contemplation of its high achievements. Only in perspectives opening enquiries about the way to practice art can one approach in an internal manner the field of artistic research: how do artists and other (human or non-human) beings or entities contributing to artistic practice interact to obtain their results. This central idea of interaction opens the field of artistic reflection to fields such as sociology, psychology, educational sciences, technologies, cultural policies, mingling artistic domains, literature, philosophy, etc. Artistic research seems to make sense if – within artistic practice itself – other elements are contributing, coming from other fields of practice (outside the arts). But in the case in which a disciplinary field outside the arts comes to influence research, it is not normal that the artistic research should conform in all aspects to the rules that apply to the imported discipline.
There is one positive aspect of the process linked to the obligation to develop research in sectors of higher education that until now were oblivious to it: collaborations with other research groups or entities become absolutely necessary. For example, concerning the Schools of Architecture, the corollary of research is a partnership in the framework of the creation of the UMR (Unité Mixte de Recherche, Mixt Unity of Research). A Mixt Unity of Research is a federation of laboratories. The objective is, in order to remedy the difficulty of being confined to ones’ own questions, to look for issues aroused by others, and to build collaborations. The projects involve the presence of funding and partners. For the Schools of Architecture it offers very interesting questions: who should we turn to? Towards the Schools of Architecture? Or towards the researchers who exist in close vicinity, but who are very different, that is Schools of Engineering, University Schools, Schools of the Arts? These partnerships lead to interesting fields. In the Schools of Architecture, the architectural project remains at the center of the study program and is nourished by four domains: engineering science, imagery, arts’ history, and philosophy/ethnology/sociology. This program of study lacks a course on writing. Architecture and writing have things to develop in common, for in research the capacity to write is indispensable.[6] All these issues lead to alterity, within domains that until now were confined to a certain insularity.
2. Theory and Practice
The separation between theory and practice remains a dominant representation in the arts.
Artistic research is thought as being primarily concerned with reflection on practices. In this context, the still dominant idea is that the practice (tacit) domain reserved to artists, remains separated from the theoretical (explicit). The theoretic thought is considered as an analysis realized after the fact, made preferably by outside observers. In the Schools of Architecture, for at least twenty years, the separation between practice and theory was dominant: separation between the architects and the engineers, separation between professional practitioners and teachers. Today, because of the State’s injunction, this separation is called into question in the requirement of a double competency to which research has to be also added. However the status of teacher/researcher still does not exist. Since last year the Schools of Architecture have a double tutelage, one from the Ministry of Culture and Communication, and one from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.
In the case of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lyon, up to now there was no training for practitioners. Here, the violent injunction of the State is that it is now necessary to train some practitioners, that is to give the students some perspectives of professionalization. For example, some courses on entrepreneurship are now organized during the first year at the Lyon II University. We are facing a delicious paradox linked to research: at the University, a stronghold of theoretical studies, there is the injunction to train practitioners, and in the Schools of Architecture and Arts, strongholds of practices, theoreticians should be trained. In the two cases it is a matter to start doing what one was not used to doing, and what one does not know how to do.
3. The Status of the Written Text
There is an astonishing uncertainty in the fact that the transposition into words, the writing of a text, is a practice that can be either creative, or be content with being an explanation tool. Is the transposition into words directly an integral part of the research processes or of artistic production, or is it only the tool for a descriptive or speculative presentation of this research or artistic production content? In the usual conceptions of university research, the transposition into words of the results tends to be exclusively considered as a process that is separated from the content and from any creative elaboration. The mechanical application of the concepts borrowed from scientific research, in order to justify the existence of artistic research, creates a strange state of mind: the artistic act is innovative, creating something new that will be directly injected into intellectual circles. What cannot be explicated by words creates some forms of distance, of exclusion, certain modes of innovation becoming in this way excluded from the field of research. The discourses around the conditions of artistic practices, notably with Bruno Latour, overshadow innovation forms that cannot be articulated with words; the words come after and outside the fact. In this scheme of thought, if someone does some research grounded on artistic practices, the language (putting into words, taking up a pencil, or using a computer) comes after, and in this way does not take part in the research process, but only in its restitution.
This separation between creative research processes and their communication by means of a text has to be questioned in two ways. On the one hand the creative transposition into words can become a tool inserted into the heart of the research process: one thinks of John Cage’s lectures,[7] which textually did not explicit much, but which described in their form in itself the processes of elaboration of the author’s musical compositions. Through these lectures, one has a direct access to the author’s experimental procedures, his modes of thinking, but without having to go through a narrative telling us how they could be explained. On the other hand, the communication of the research contents can use different medias other than text: films, videos, recorded speech, graphisms, sounds, images.
Behind the term research, there are many words that come to complicate its effective implementation: “innovation”, “scientific aspects”, “discourses”, etc. Is there a loss of sense when the discourse comes after the fact? The Cage lectures are no less, nor more research than his musical works. The criteria “discourse” is not sufficient to define research, nor the one of “science”, because a whole number of things should be summoned. One cannot therefore proceed with a single entry. What is complicated is to intertwine all the elements with each other.
Artistic Research – Avenues to Reflect
1. Research through the Elaboration of the Artistic Act
The principal enigma that needs to be resolved has to do with the situation of the artist in today’s society: is research an inherent obligation for the artistic act today? And, if the answer is positive, how can research be distinguished from the artistic act? In the perspectives of a coexistence of historical times, which is an important aspect of our society of electronic communication, it is quite possible to continue to consider that autonomous art – the one exclusively devoted to the production of works outside any circumstantial or contingent consideration – still plays an important part in the field of practices. But the possibilities offered by the new media fundamentally change the deal of artistic practices in considerably facilitating their access and in allowing amateurs to create their own means of production. These amateurs have time at hand – that professionals often have difficulty to find – for thinking through their own practice or for getting in a position favoring experimentation. The stakes of the obligation to present the work on stage – the living spectacle – are modified: processes limited to small groups, devoid of the objective to produce definitive works of art, devoid of the obligatory presence of a contemplative external public, become possible. In this type of context, it is possible to envision research as an integral part of practice, because the practice addresses at once the rationales of the production, of the interactivity between participants, and between the participants with the materials to be used.
Several factors contribute to identify artistic research to practical processes. The research linked to artistic education leads directly to practical artistic acts.: there is no pedagogical action without a direct effect on artistic practice, on ways to envisage the material production of the artistic objects, and consequently on their plasticity itself; and vice-versa, a given practice leading to particular artistic results always implies some methods of knowledge transmission in order to attain it. As soon as one is preoccupied by education, one realizes how until now effective practices have failed to concern researchers, that is the processes leading to artistic productions, everything that occurs before the emergence of the work.
2. Alternative Research Models
Other models should be considered that do not correspond to what is done in the world of the university, notably those already elaborated by personalities such as Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion and Isabelle Stengers. In spite of the fact that since about twenty years, we have been facing a movement, over the medium to long term, of normalization of research, other models can be envisioned if we limit ourselves to an independent intellectual content. But it is not evident how to adopt these models in order to realize, at the margins of the institutions, something different while using the same terms. There are no other alternatives than to create some pockets of resistance using a diversity of models. The pockets of resistance become necessary in face of the great complexity of globalization and the challenges it poses to the great democratic models. Deindustrialization has risen to unbelievable proportions, the working class movement disappeared in less than twenty years. There should be some places and circumstances that allow people to maintain a spirit of resistance for at least a certain time. It is necessary to have some kaïros, some reaction to opportune time, in seizing all the occasions that can occur.
The question of markets and their role in the control of artistic production is increasingly disturbing. At the same time, the markets succeeded in liberating and disseminating the techniques that allow alternative inventions, something the musicians from the elite could not achieve. It is important to be able to develop a reflective approach to the tools of dissemination, to software, to the issues raised by business markets, in order to develop possible rationales for alternative public policies.
An institution like the Cefedem AuRA remains determined by the professional context in which it develops its actions. In general, musicians are less preoccupied by research issues than the actors of the other artistic domains. We can see that musicians have a strong tendency to return to an outdated corporatism. Concerning the norms of the definition of a musician and her/his activities in the professional milieu, the development of the Cefedem AuRA as a place of questioning these norms was completely improbable. This pocket of resistance allowed many people to invent their own line of action. Today, a possible focus of resistance is not to limit the Cefedem’s program of study to teacher’s training, but to turn to the education of practicing musicians at the heart of their practices both of transmission and of elaboration of their art: a reflexive thinking on music and art, on accompanying amateur practices, on the double social and artistic rationale that underlies the actual role of musicians in society. One can assert a singular approach.
3. Administrative Obstacles
There is an astonishing paradox between the reality of the institutions of artistic education and the injunction to develop research and intellectual thinking. All the schools of the arts have to face budget reductions; all the sectors of practices have made great efforts. The incitation to research is developed in an environment that remains very rigid and without the means to provide adequate responses. As soon as new pedagogical projects are proposed, even if they are neither exceptional nor experimental, but that are near the realities of what it is possible to do, many obstacles and roadblocks appear. The arts schools lag behind in the use of new technologies (video, image rights, diffusion issues), and the few tools they are capable of developing are not available to students and teachers. In the domain of popular music (officially called in France musiques actuelles amplifiées, amplified actual music), there exists in Copenhagen an “incredible” department: spaces full of the newest technologies available to users. However, the department collaborates directly with the record labels that impose their criteria, this does not correspond to the role of public institutions. In the public service of music education, the participants are not there to obey the demands of the market place, to produce groups conforming to its rules and to release commercial products. The public service has to bring its own independent vision. People are encouraged to do new things, but as soon as a proposition is formulated, it comes up against the rigidity of the system. The only thing that we do not know how to do, it is to change the system.
4. The question of Research Spaces and Publications
One can see the importance of the existence of research spaces, precisely in order to change the rigid systems just mentioned. It is very important for a research group to have an adequate place and to be able to make it function: this is linked to the available time of the participants and their ability to attract some funding. In order for artistic research to be viable, militant approaches are not enough. It is also necessary to have the capacity to develop some forms of visibility associated with the public expression of the practices (the stage, education). How should we proceed so that what has been discovered, updated, can be heard somewhere as an element that cannot be ignored. In order for this research-resistance to exist, the conditions that would move the constraints imposed by the institutions have to be determined. How can we make sure that this research would be promoted and could cross the threshold of confidentiality, of self-confinement?
What is important is to build some traces. Resistance should be conducted through some existent things, through the “bringing to life”, it implies therefore publications that give full account of the different aspects of the place one occupies. The absence in the musicians’ world of an association that would be capable of defending something other than traditional (if not reactionary) objects is sorely evident. Why is it so difficult to federate the points of view that are not along those lines? How to get out of isolation? Making the path in life by walking would be a good start.
Those who exist in an institutional place often think that the things that are possible have to be envisaged outside the institutions. But those who are outside suffer from isolation and anonymity, from the plethora of information. A public place, whatever it might be, has the merit to exist, it gives a margin of possibilities. The Cefedem has had the good fortune to have been able to develop independently from the conservatories and the universities. The PaaLabRes collective hopes that the digital space paalabres.org being developed will be to some extent the equivalent of a place that seems up to now unavailable. Enseigner la Musique has been the essential tool for disseminating the practices developed at the Cefedem AuRA and other associated places.
Widening Research
1. Research Before the Doctorate
In the world of universities, real research starts at the doctorate level. Nevertheless, the idea that one can carry some research project from the very start of higher education, or even before that, is perfectly viable. Several places in Europe and in the world have been able to experiment this idea with success.[8] To introduce research from undergraduate level onwards is a way to refuse that the laws of the market place should define what could be expected of students at the end of their studies. The Rector of the Lille University said recently[9] that today the social sciences and the arts are no longer just tools to be acquired to shine in society, but are becoming completely indispensable to surpass the fact that machines in the hard sciences are going to be able to do all possible things replacing the humans. In music, the historical definitions of professional occupation are collapsing: we do not know to what we should train the students. The issue is not to train musicians to acquire a pre-established technique, but to do research would give them a more distanced point of view on their actions. They will be able in that way to continually reinvent their practices, rather than to reproduce fixed models. This creates another rationale for resistance: to imagine what will be the nature of the professional occupation tomorrow is not possible anymore, but it is also necessary to realize that the “professional occupation invented by contemporaries never existed”, it is invented along the way throughout history.
In the process of widening the concept of research to contexts fairly different from the one limited to doctoral studies and accredited laboratories, three levels can be observed in the education framework: a) the formal research of university doctoral studies and laboratories; b) preparation to research that concerns higher education as a whole; and c) learning through research that can be done at any level, including at that of children beginners. Moreover, it must be realized that these three levels are themselves distinct from experimental postures that are in operation today in many domains. Numerous approaches of this type exist at the same time in education institutions, in working places, in everyday life and in artistic practices that can be qualified as “reflective practices”.
2. Research Before and Outside Higher Education
Within the music schools (specialized music education at primary and secondary levels) there is a surprising presence of high-level groups whose members do not particularly demand rehearsal spaces, or supports for technical production or advertising. They come to these public institutions specifically to develop research projects, outside any consideration for acquiring a professional trade. These projects are very often centered on meeting other aesthetics and different ways to practice music.
Today, in music schools, there are many study programs (in the process of experimentation) in which the students are solicited in collective situations to learn specific things in an active manner by trial and error, in a different temporality than the one traditionally used and by varying in diverse ways the learning situations.[10] In these programs, research is inextricably a corollary to learning, not only on the side of the leadership of the teachers who have to continually redefine their actions in relation to the contexts given by the students, but also on the side of the students putting themselves in research situations. The idea of research is a posture that is assumed on an everyday basis, it is not a pretentious access to formalism, and it changes completely the sense of artistic studies. The goal is to develop enlightened practitioners, capable of carrying out inventive actions in an autonomous manner.
Performers are often the butt of caricatures, incapable of carrying research on their own, but, to take an example, a model exists today in the revitalization of old music in which there is a collective work on interpretation, which can be qualified as a research in acts. It is then possible to start with an affirmative that what one is doing is research.
It is very important, even necessary, to be able to document these numerous new manners to envision teaching in music schools, the practitioners should be encouraged to write texts, producing videos, using all the possible media so that a collective knowledge can be developed, which would nourish the reflection on practices.
This documentation would help to see more precisely what constitutes artistic research; there is by the way a strong demand in the artistic world for the diffusion of such documents.
3. Research Outside the Norms
Many activities of research are carried out by people who never speak about it, who never write a single line about it. It does not prevent them from inventing things that do not inevitably correspond to the sense of innovation promoted by the governmental instances. How can we give full account of what remains a blind spot? To make these practices known would be a way to restore the meaning that one can give to democracy. In effect, there is an obvious unfairness in the large number of closures instituted to control access to research: in music, perfect pitch, dictation, standard sound, etc. It does not function in this way in reality, as there are many people whose practice does not correspond to these norms. The ones who feel they can legitimately speak about their practices, and who are willing to do it, do not do it for clearly argued reasons. They are willing to speak about them, and do it because they have some ideas in their mind. Behind their initiatives, some social strategies are in process. It is necessary to determine why one does things, to recognize what strategies are in place, to fully assume them, to make them known to the public. There is the need to break down some walls, of not thinking all this out of the blue, outside a context, without the presence of strategic objectives, to explicit what one is ready to defend.
Post-scriptum to the debate:
Exchange Forum PAALabRes “Artistic Research”
Following the debate organized on Novermber 2, 2015 on artistic research several questions remain to be clarified or discussed. We propose an exchange forum on the following questions:
- To what extent do artistic practices today necessitate processes of research inherent to their acts, yet remaining distinct from them?
- The issue of methods and criteria specific to research carried out by the practitioners themselves in relationship to their own artistic practices.
- The issue of a strong representation in people’s minds of a dichotomy between theory and practice. Is it the case that the distinction between fundamental, intellectual or formal research (considered as theoretical) and professional training (considered as practical) introduces more confusion in this debate between practice and theory (practicing theory and theorizing implicitly the practices)? Is the questioning on artistic practices – professional or other – of the domain of theory? Can it be done without some references to practical examples?
- Issues concerning the usefulness of research: the distance between the usefulness of a research activity for a given group of humans and the fact that if things are defined as useful from the beginning of a fundamental or artistic research, one refuses to accept that the results might be unpredictable. Is there the necessity to make a distinction between “usefulness” and “utilitarianism”?
- Issues concerned with the status of written texts in relation to artistic research and creation: to what extent are they part of the research in itself? To what extent are they only tools for communicating the research results?
- The contradictions between study tracks that are very often orientated towards individual work and the collective actions of laboratories.
Stories chronicling experiences would be welcome in connection with this notion of artistic research. The description of contexts in which disciplinary fields are in interaction, notably in the confrontation between arts and sciences, would be of great interest for this forum.
PaaLabRes accepts to consider for this debate very short contributions (6 lines for example) as well as more developed texts (one page). The research articles would be considered as potential contributions outside this “debate forum”.
PaaLabRes is in charge of the processes of presentation and of edition of the contributions in a spirit of exchange. Different types of encounters and interactions will be organized in order to continue working on these issues.
[1] The Cefedem AuRA, Centre de Formation des Enseignants de la Musique was created in 1990 by the Ministry of Culture in order to organize a study program leading to the State Diploma for Teaching Music within specialized music education (schools of music and conservatories). The Cefedem Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes based in Lyon developed a research publication, Enseigner la Musique, and created a Study Center on teaching artistic practices and their cultural mediations. See the site: cefedem-aura.org
[2] The collective PaaLabRes, Pratiques Artistiques en Actes, Laboratoire de Recherches, was created in 2011 by ten musicians working in the Lyon region, with the objective to reflect on their own practices,including both the logics of artistic production and of transmission, the logics of research and free reflection.
[3] Informal text by Jean-Charles François, 2012 (unpublished).
[4] Voir La Recherche en art(s), ed. Jehanne Dautrey, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris : Editions MF, 2010.
[5] Voir Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Ghent, Belgium : Orpheus Institute, distributed by Leuwen University Press, 2013. This series of articles is centered on the research of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Director at the Max-Planck Institute of the history of sciences department, on the epristemology of experimentation.
[6] For example, the School of Architecture of Saint-Etienne is now developing a track with the Lyon ENS (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon), mixing architecture and writing.
[7] See John Cage, Silence, Cambridge, Mass. And London, England: The M.I.T. Press, 1966; see also John Cage, Empty Words, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
[8] See notably The Reflexive Conservatoire, Studies in Music Education Eds. George Odam and Nicholas Bannan, London : Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Aldershot, England : Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005. The Cefedem AuRA in its program leading to the Diplôme d’Etat centered the curriculum on students’ projects in the domain of artistic practices, pedagogy and reflection (writing an essay); Jean-Charles François, Eddy Schepens, Karine Hahn, Dominique Clément, « Processus contractuels dans les projets de réalisation musicale des étudiants au Cefedem Rhône-Alpes », Enseigner la Musique N° 9/10, Cefedem Rhône-Alpes, pp. 173-94.
[9] Private conversation with Jacques Moreau, director of the Cefedem AuRA, 2015.
[10] The ENM (Ecole Nationale de Musique) of Villeurbanne is one of the very active places working in this direction, notably in the program EPO (Ecole Par l’Orchestre, Learning through Orchestra) developed by Philippe Genet, Pascal Pariaud and Gérald Venturi, and the one from the Rock department with Gilles Laval.