TRACK: track, path, road, way, trajectory, footprint, impression, trace, piece of music, musical track, railway (track)
Summary
He enters with his locomotive under his arm, into his workshop-hut, his haven. It is there that he has created a world, a back base from which he can escape without moving. Because what he loves is to be surrounded by sounds, movements, and stories that he invents. So he traces tracks and sets up circuits where he places small motorized trains, so that it runs, infinitely. With his mouth and voice, he creates journeys for them, opens spaces and sound paths, and lets his vocal imprint unfold and float like the smoke from his locomotives. Repetition after repetition, loop after loop, here he ventures a little further, risking, without seeming to, into daring and sensitive adventures. He reinvents the very idea of travel, his own constantly renewed, a cappella and with ten fingers, a miniature yet extraordinary odyssey of a strange stationmaster, a delicate giant watching over his tiny world.
What is at stake in TRACK and how it will be presented
At the start of the project, there is the voice of the actor and human beatbox Laurent Duprat. In TRACK, I want to concretely show the live construction of musical compositions and soundscapes. That is to say, to materialize sound loops and layers of sound into physical objects and then set them in motion. These sound modules will be mounted on small trains that will run all around Laurent on the tracks of a giant circuit.
The audience will be seated at 270° around this large circuit and will witness a railway choreography where the signals, level crossings, and barriers will be the extraordinary metronomes of a theater of connected sound objects in motion.
The small trains are objects charged with a powerful collective imagination. They carry within them – and this, regardless of the age of the viewer – the evocative force of play and all journeys. With his breath and voice, Laurent will be the engine of the locomotives. Alternately, puppeteer, passenger, driver, or spectator. Inside or outside the device, with a freedom and a porosity in the roles that we find in children's games.
Technical and technological content in the service of dramaturgy
In our creations, sound is the driving force of play; it is a concrete material just like the objects and materials with which our plastic universes are built. In this approach, we call upon technology to invent our own tools in the service of dramaturgy.
To make sound palpable, manipulable – like a unit of a construction game – Thomas Sillard, sound artist, developed in 2018 a system of connected objects that fit in the hand: wireless, smart, and interactive speakers, the first generation of which led to the show BLOCK.
This invention born from the meeting between my practice as a puppeteer and that of sound creator Thomas has opened the way to a new language, in constant development, which we call: theater of connected sound objects, and which is today the main axis of our research and the specificity of the company.
In TRACK, I summon the human beatbox, which is a concrete and organic medium with the body as the only instrument. Its structure is that of the loop, of repetition, and juxtaposition. It is similar to the way children grasp language and play with their voices.
I want to materialize this sound construction and these loops through a concrete orbiting of the sounds played live. The sounds will be broadcast by connected sound modules designed to capture Laurent's voice tracks live. These modules themselves will be set in motion on our railway circuit.
The entire device will be deployed over several levels of a circuit 5m in diameter, including switches, barriers, and mechanical light and percussive devices. The writing of this moving sound spatialization is unprecedented for us as well as for the composer-performer and can only be written in situ, on stage.
Creation and writing process
I invent sound, visual, and technological forms. In TRACK, I bring together several mediums: human beatbox, object theater, sound creation, and technology in the service of the whole.
The research I conduct on stage around these elements – mainly through improvisations and frictions between different languages – generates a set of sequences or tableaux. I then work on the arrangement of these sequences, which are articulated – not by the authority of a prior narrative that would impose this or that story – but with a dosage between the narrative thread and collage. In my approach, it is the material – which is not always obedient – that holds authority. This applies equally to objects as well as to technology, by the way.
This arrangement of sequences is directly related to the notion of journey and experience of the spectators. I draw a path for the hearing and the sight: I define what I want them to look at – but not what I want them to see – and where I want them to listen – but not what I want them to hear. I give them, in a way, a map to orient themselves within the work, I guide them.
In the forms I propose, the spectator is exempt from the necessity of a narrative logic. They are simply invited to wander. It is the mediums themselves that transport and serve as a vehicle for the spectator.
To do this, I mark the path by creating focuses and precise plans, in the cinematic sense. These markers, these focuses, generate their own narratives and fictions. I rarely concern myself with transitions; I rather have a practice of ellipsis and juxtaposition. I work by free association without getting lost in surrealism, because what interests me is the jubilation and freedom that suddenly explode when a collage is successful. This aligns with the logic of children who, in their games or stories, exempt themselves from all constraints to unfold their own logic and are thus inspiring creators.
Sound writing and object theater have in common a heavy reliance on ellipses and easily shift into different units of time and place. In this sense, I force nothing; on the contrary, often in the process, I let things happen. It is indeed there, in the freedom that imposes itself, in the resistance I encounter and the displacement it induces, that the heart of my approach becomes clearer. Today, this method of working is essential to me because I have been able to verify that it produces a transcendence that allows me constant contact with the unexpected and offers me continuous renewal.
The narrative thread is often taken care of by the presence of the performer on stage. That is to say, their character's journey – in relation to the objects and their microcosm – acts as a reference for the audience. Their total sincerity, their obstinacy in a quest for understanding and an attempt to organize the world, the conflicts this generates, their difficulties, their will to master and the resistance of things, this is what I want to put into perspective for the audience. Thus, we can say that in my shows, objects, sound, and humans share the responsibility for the story.
Céline Garnavault
