Laurent Dupont - Plis/sons

Laurent Dupont and the artistic team of the project “Petite Enfance “Clair/obscur”.

“Side by side” finds place in a circular space. Populated by objects, selected for their forms and their materials, this space allows an actor/musician to involve himself in the corporal play, to tickle our eyes and surprise our ears.

In this relation of nearness, a first play of correspondences starts between the musical bodies and the modes of play. The writing will be interested in the masses, in the densities, in the transparencies or the touch of a sound. This will be the image of a gesture: all that is revealed from the listening – the production and the selection of sound materials – will be related to the scenic set-up and to the actions it inspires.

Little by little the sound source becomes supernatural: first in a play of presence and absence between what I see and what I hear, and then it will be swallowed by the catches of sound.

Taking the sound and then reproducing it immediately, increases and amplifies it, like an echo of the acting that has just begun. But its reproduction comes in a different point selected in the scenic space. We play with this distance to nuance a gesture and start a new dialogue. Then we act an exchange through a listening.

This progressive rerouting between the synchronism of the view and the hearing, reinforce a complicity of the play with the sound. It allows us to awaken the unusual, the strange. It invites us to take the first steps of a sound memory together.

“Side by Side”: a mirror play, possible between a complementary plastic and sonorous writing to express the almost nothing, to make understand a hidden world, the one of sounds. Then let the member of the audience progressively appropriate to a listening of the invisible and appeal to his curiosity of the imaginary.

Making the sound the framework of our history, inviting to the listening.

The body and the sound – the musical bodies and electro acoustic machines – are the languages chosen to realise the play. These two energies are malleable and rebellious. Far from all kind of formalism, they provoke us in our most intimate entrenchments. One and another ask us about our presence, in our relations with the other one, person or object.

“Side by side”: this title was chosen in order to remember the Echo and its crazy love relation with Narcissus, for the plays the little child experiences every day in its emotional relations, visual and sonorous, in its apprehension of the world.


Laurent Dupont:         “EN ECHOS” – “IN ECHOES”

Laurent Dupont and the artistic team of the project “Petite Enfance “Clair/obscur”.

An interactive sound installation

“In Echoes” proposes the valorisation of a technology committed in the programme “Vibratis I” for the creation of the virtual gallery “Gaston B.”. It allows the adaptation to an original artistic context. “In Echoes” asks questions about the forms of transmission of a know-how technology that necessarily will go through a change in the playing between the children and their parents.

The piece’s sonorous and scenic conception takes over certain sonorous and visual principles of the theatrical creation by enriching it with new contributions.

The sounds constitute the new sound alphabet and are a reagent memory of the modes of acting that have produced them.

A circular space forming the scene is made of “tactile” material and a “lumino-technique” installation. These friendly routes induce the exploration of this technological instrument to a new musical and sonorous experimentation through the movement. In the heart of the work a sonorous, perceptible material is achieved through the registration of the sonorous gestures created from the same materials as used for the realisation of the scenic space. These materials develop according to the moving of the audience, becoming an actor of their own sonorous universe, seeking their own imaginary.

“In Echoes” is a new piece of this gallery. A reflection of a theatrical form is conceived, the piece allows an original integration of the new technologies in the frame of modern spectacle. It becomes a new tool where the texture calls to mind the sensitive traces of the spectacle.

The piece can be installed independently in another context, like a museographical space. This set up of sonorous immersion offers a new poetic and visual route to a widened public of small children and the parents that accompany them.

The use of the educational aims is in fact reinforced by these new contributions. It allows a thorough research and an experimental work about the effects of the movement to the sound and conversely. It creates a kind of “kinesological” research around the musical gesture.

The artistic team

The artistes involved in the realisation of the project are: Bruno Bernard, with the conception and the musical conception, Laurent Dupont, with the scenic conception and Christine Vadrot with the scenographic realisation.

(Translated by: Linn Grimstad, 21.06.04)