As part of the Semaine du Neuf, Le Vivier chose to bring Les Percussions de Strasbourg for the show Ghostland, by Pierre Jodlowski. We could not better illustrate the mutations of a genre launched around sixty years ago with the creation of this group.
In a sort of dull and muffled growl, a woman’s voice states the poem The king of alders, by Goethe. In German obviously, since the show is “presented thanks to the support of the French Institute and the Consulate General of France from Quebec to Montreal” (sic!). This must be Europe.
As for the later poem, a story of scorpions, our too rudimentary Germanic culture did not allow us to identify it. There is a last one, possibly a snake thing, that a lady disguised as something that mixes beekeeper, fencer and sister of Tutankhamun whispers in the ears of the percussionists, who mime the movements of grasshoppers. The fencer had previously spread the luminescent sticks that she had straddled on the ground equidistantly.
Shadows and lights
If this all seems a little strange to you, it’s completely normal: Ghostland, by Pierre Jodlowski, is an “immersive and captivating” creation, which “plunges us into a space with indefinite borders”. We are very far from Pleiades, by Xenakis, and we can hardly imagine Jean Batigne, founder of the Percussions de Strasbourg, more inclined to sauerkraut and sylvaner, playing the grasshopper next to Tutankhamun’s sister.
That said, times are changing, and our interview last Saturday with Minh-Tâm Nguyen, artistic director of the fourth generation of Percussions de Strasbourg, shed light on the issues. Today, therefore, it is time for an “immersive and captivating” show. After the death of the child in his father’s arms (for those who understood German and recognized the poem), the first painting, ghostly, a Halloween nightmare, is exceptional in the management of light and shadow, the hubbub sometimes almost unbearable, illustrating panic and hallucination (with so many stroboscopic effects, it would have been more than prudent to warn of the dangerousness of this painting for epileptic people). It’s a shame that the electronic sound is not always “in sync” with the projected images, for example when the protagonists bang on the tables.
A second scene, after the text on the scorpions, is first noted by a very clever way of changing the decor and bringing the instruments on stage (because the percussionists also do Clan Panneton now, being careful not to get your feet in the microphone wires). The subject is the oppression of the world of work. Everything turns upside down in a spectacular way (video and lighting). There is very refined work in fact on empty and full in the stage space and sound, with a striking moment. Lights and shadows are very cleverly used by Jodlowski.
The video is effective, the quartet of percussionists impressive, and Katharina Muschiol prowls with spidery flexibility, but, almost everywhere, the electronics are very intrusive. Many things are very tense in the vast majority of Ghostland (Tables I and II, or three quarters of the show): the denunciation (or oppression) is angry and exacerbated. There are, however, flashes of subtlety in the use of electronics: a sequence of opening briefcases, triggering cleverly spatialized “industrial” noises at the start of IIe painting and setting up the sound frame of the final painting (square) with the woodblocks.
The ultravoltage of IIe painting is not necessarily useful to the subject: the deleterious universe of productivism is denounced without fanfare, but in an even more scathing manner by the Spanish visual artist and photographer Isaac Cordal. Anyone who wishes can create a slideshow of their works at home and accompany it with Black of the star, by Gérard Grisey, who shows us with more subtlety the full palette that a work composed for the genre can deploy. But isn’t the important thing here, beyond the music, the “indefinite border”? Oh sorry, ” Die unbegrenzte Grenze » ; it’s so much more chic.