An encounter/performance/conference – surreptitious, impromptu, improvised, and always original – between Michel Mandel (clarinets, objects) and Nicolas Hubert (dance, objects).
Two tables, two speakers… A conference on the absurdity of a debate without language or a message, without theory or rhetoric. Microphones everywhere ; life through a lens, magnified, the smallest gesture amplified, exaggerated, disfigured – the infinitesimal becomes absurd.
To inspire, to hesitate, to demonstrate, to address, to burst into flames in a gestural rant – an acoustic joust. Alteration of gesture, of vibration, of the present : a non-verbal language, perceptible and audible.
This project was born out of our desire to create a scenic object that is at the same time structured and scripted, especially through its scenography, and open, in its score, to the improvisation and mutual communication of the two protagonists. Its method and process (an amplified table) creates a space that allows each protagonist to enter the other’s field : the musician creating a gestural sequence, the dancer generating sound (by scratching the acoustic surface of the table - through friction, percussion, creaking…).
Working around objects and the sound they produce on the “prepared” table creates a constant ebb and flow between the abstraction of a language that each performer interprets differently, and a certain theatricality of the absurd, born from the idea of a fake conference. This concept of the conference, containing no real reasoning or message, becomes a path that allows us to explore the gestural aspects of speech, without the speech itself. It’s a sort of “gestural song”, where the context of public speaking serves as the dramaturgic premise of an encounter of two media : music and dance, both of them existing, paradoxically, outside the realm of language.
"For this third creation, the choreographer Nicolas Hubert puts, once again, at the center of the stage, absurd and improvisation that form a dance where bodies and sounds reply to each other"
Odile Morain - Culturebox
Production Compagnie épiderme / Coproductions La Rampe et La Ponatière, scène conventionnée - Échirolles (38) (dans le cadre de la résidence triennale de la compagnie), Ballet de l’Opéra national du Rhin / CCN de Mulhouse (dans le cadre de l’accueil studio), La Forge CIR - Grenoble. Avec le soutien de La Filature / scène nationale – Mulhouse.
La compagnie épiderme est conventionnée par la Ville de Grenoble, soutenue par le Conseil Général de l’Isère, la Région Rhône-Alpes et la DRAC Rhône-Alpes (aide à la compagnie).