Nina Garcia chooses the body and physical involvement as a new field of collective experimentation and invites Jennifer Caubet, Romain Simon, Anna Gaïotti and Christophe Cardoen, to create a space of games where bodies, sounds, lights and sculptures mix and clash.
A slow movement, without beginning or end, timeless falls, sand that erodes the forms, a sculptural space that bars any line of flight and streaks a playing surface where bodies strive to sound and advance until exhaustion.
In an exercise in applied anti-maieutics, this new team shares with the audience a space in tension with shifting contours, where light blocks the view, where silence frightens noise, where intensity rises when everything else only descends. Three and a half bodies and an ode to hand, foot and finger percussion for a story to be re-constructed each evening, a choreographic disarticulation driven by sounds, shapes and shadows.
L'épuisement du corps
The starting point is a series of researches carried out by four people around the physical involvement of the musicians and its impact on the sound and musical creation. Gestures are either prevented or pushed to the extreme. Improvisation, repetition, obstinacy, the games of Anna Gaïotti (tap dancing), Romain Simon (drums) and Nina Garcia (electric guitar) already have in them this commitment, this stubbornness to make sound, until exhaustion, at the edge of the inaudible. Making the most of the percussion made by hand, foot, finger, it is a choreographic (dis)articulation led by the sounds that is played.
Sculpture
Jennifer Caubet's sculpture, raw and fragile, opposes its strength to the bodies crossed by the sound. It draws a space of play, as much as it streaks it and diffracts it. It is a source of individualization, of separation but also of links. It appears on the stage as a fourth guest, caught in a fall as slow as certain, and revises at each moment the relations to the stage.
Music
Sound and music remain the primary objects of the meeting of these artists. At the crossroads of experimental, improvised and noise music, De haut en bas, de bas en haut et latéralement is first and foremost a concert, built by three people in the moment for the spectators. If each evening everything will remain to be de-re-constructed, the orientation will be resolutely of high intensity, noisy and percussive, with its batch of tensions and suffocating silences.
Public
The public sits as close as possible to the sculptures and the musicians, preferably in an arc around the performance space. The spectators are immersed in the sound, they can feel the physical involvement of the performers, as well as the energy of the falling sculptures. Artist and audience form a whole caught in the same movement, in the same tension; far from a spectacular time, this movement is always in progress, it knows neither beginning nor end. The time of the concert is arbitrary, following the departure of the performers the installation continues to function.
Artistic production and distribution
Nina Garcia
Delegated production
La Muse en Circuit - CNCM
Coproduction
Ici l'Onde ; Le Générateur ; GMEM ; La Soufflerie - Rezé ; Espace Multimédia Gantner - service du Département du Territoire de Belfort
Aide à la création de la Région Île-de-France
Support
la Maison de la Musique Contemporaine ; CNM - Centre National de la Musique
Nina Garcia
Born in 1990, lives and works in Paris.
Nina Garcia conducts research and creative work on the electric guitar, halfway between improvised music and noise. Her equipment is reduced to a minimum: a guitar, a pedal and an amp, with which she sculpts sound and excavates chaos to bring out the unheard-of. For her solo Mariachi, the focus is on gesture and research into the instrument, its resonances, its limits, its extensions, its impurities, its audible recesses: going with or against it, containing it or letting it sound, supporting it or violating it. Here you'll find feedbacks, crackles, short circuits, impacts, harmonics, squeaks and, by chance, near-perfect notes and chords.
More a duo than a solo, it stuns with its blend of technical mastery and total freedom. A convergence of wildness and tenderness with her instrument, a tense corps à corps between two vibrant souls for a music and choreography of raw poetry.
Nina Garcia also plays in a duo with Danish trombonist Maria Bertel, in a trio with Swiss musicians Antoine Chessex (saxophone) and Louis Schild (bass), and in the group mamiedaragon.
Since 2019, she has been a member of the improvisation ensemble Le Un, which brings together 25 improvising musicians and organizes various events around large ensemble improvisation.
In 2020/21, she was in residence at GRM for a creation commission for the Présences électroniques festival, where she presented Mariachi-Sme, a piece performed live in octophony.
In 2021, she will create Autoreverse, a new duet with Arnaud Rivière (with the support of Drac Île-de-France, La Muse en Circuit - CNCM and GMEM - Centre national de création musicale).
Nina Garcia has been selected for the European Shape Platform program in 2019, with the support of the Némo biennial.
Nina Garcia has also been involved in concert organization, dissemination and transmission of experimental music for 10 years. Until 2021, she was in charge of cultural activities at Les Instants Chavirés, then co-programmer of concerts in 2020 and 2021. She is also involved in experimental music education, leading workshops for art students (EsadHar, Le Havre, 2017), and for children in schools (Le DOC, Saint-Germain d'Ectot, 2022). He has performed at : Gaité Lyrique (Paris); Muse en Circuit-Cncm (Alfortville); GMEA-Cncm (Albi); Biennale Némo Trianon (Paris); Queen Sophia National Museum (Madrid); Sommarscen (Malmö); Bruits Blancs, Cube (Issy-les-Moulineaux); Espace Gantner (Bourogne); Sonic Protest (Paris); Festival de la cité (Lausanne); Zwei Tage Zeit (Zurich); Luff (Lausanne); Festival Musica (Strasbourg); Gong (Copenhagen); Tripledecker (Graz); Skaņu Meûs (Riga); Festival Météo (Mulhouse); Cave 12 (Geneva); Musique Action (Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy); Ateliers Claus (Brussels); Banlieues Bleues (Pantin); Café de la Danse (Paris); Café Oto (London); Echoraum (Wien); Jazzhouse (Copenhagen); All Ears Festival (Oslo); InaGRM (Paris) - www.parabailarlabamba.fr
Jennifer Caubet
Born in 1982, lives and works in Aubervilliers.
Represented by Galerie Jousse Entreprise.
Jennifer Caubet graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2008, after completing various training courses in Toulouse, Barcelona and Tokyo. Thanks to singular productions with specialists, engineers, architects and companies, she has begun to reflect on, in and around space, through sculpture, installation and drawing. The forms and lines that Jennifer Caubet deploys in spaces inaugurate the site of the work and the exhibition as territories of relationships not only constructed, but to be constructed.
Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at the Maréchalerie in Versailles, the BF15 in Lyon, the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Chalet Society, Instants Chavirés, the Chapelle Saint-Nicolas in Pluméliau and the Jousse Entreprise gallery.
She is invited to take part in residency programs such as the Christoph Merian Foundation, Vent des forêts, the Centre d'Art des Tanneries, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and the CIRVA - Centre international du verre et des arts plastiques in Marseille.
Her works are part of the collections of Lafayette Anticipations, Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, the Centre national des arts plastiques - CNAP, the FRAC Occitanie - Montpellier and the Frac Provence Alpes-Côte d'Azur.
" Jennifer Caubet deploys networks of lines on the surface of sheets of paper or in space, in devices that are both concrete and abstract. In her work, the transition from the second to the third dimension is easy to understand, with drawing deriving from design, i.e. from a project and a plan that can be understood as so many attempts to take hold of space. Here, drawing/drawing becomes writing of and in space. Borrowing their vocabulary and tools from the fields of cartography and topography, the drawings she creates function as matrices or partitions that can be activated in the form of installations in specific locations. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, Jennifer Caubet appropriates "calques", i.e. already parameterized and identified states of affairs, to invent her own maps, original and subjective tracings with multiple entries. This is the case, for example, with his kits, assemblages of metal structures and arrows shot with a bow to configure available enclaves, and more recently with Point Omega (2017), three glass structures traversed by water and connected to solar panels, both autonomous and in direct contact with the space from which they draw one of their main resources, namely light. From plan to volume, they are always networks of lines, coordinates and spatial trajectories, both real and imaginary, parameterizing space and expressing various ways of being-in-the-world, between states of withdrawal and extension, charged with a fictional potential where utopia sometimes meets dystopia." Sarah Ilher-Meyer. - www.jennifercaubet.com
Romain Simon
Born in 1981, lives and works in Amiens, France.
A musician and activist in the French noise and experimental music scene, Romain Simon is today one of the most exciting figures on the scene.
A drummer in numerous bands since 2000, Romain Simon moves between incisive rock, sonic experimentation and textured noise. He builds a specific set-up for each group, from acoustic drums to 100% electronic devices, and even a mixed instrumentarium, as in his solo Baton xxl: a tombasse and a snare drum played standing up, effects on the feet, and a banjo set against a guitar amp in autonomous feedback.
What all these installations have in common is a raw, intense approach to percussion, an assertive play with rhythm and metrics, a search for trance, a direct strike, a sound of radical wholeness, a mastery of tension and suspended gesture.
Romain Simon plays on international and European stages. He has been heard in such groups as Me Donner and La Race, as well as in the legendary French noise rock band Headwar. He has also played alongside the Norwegian band MoE, and the French Sister Iodine.
Romain Simon is also involved in the organization and life of experimental and underground music in France, notably within the concert hall l'Accueil Froid Nuke, which he co-founded in Amiens in 2012, and of which he is still co-programmer. - http://www.batonxxl.bandcamp.com/
Anna Gaïotti
Lives and works in the Paris region.
Anna Gaïotti is a choreographer, musician and writer. Her work takes shape in her relationship with experimental music, noise / harsh noise / techno, and relates in her life and dance experiences the nocturnal worlds she crosses, here and elsewhere.
Coming from a performance background, she stages the body through a self-created script in which she confronts choices and non-choices, doubts and norms, the fiction and reality of a personal or shared identity.
Through these shows, as well as her self-taught tap-dancing and experimental approach to music, she questions the divide between music and dance, shaping writing that starts from the experience of the sound body and a present environment, before it composes and freezes.
Anna Gaïotti studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2003-2009). After meeting artist Antonia Baehr, she turned radically to performance art, which she linked to writing, voice work and her own body. In 2011, she joined ESSAI at the CNDC in Angers. She was awarded a DanceWeb scholarship at Impulstanz Wien in 2014. She joins the Research group of P.A.R.T.S in Brussels with Bojana Cvejik.
She created the dyptic (soli) Rbel fter m heart and Annus in 2013 at the CNDC d'Angers. In 2016, she collaborated with Nina Garcia on the soloPlus de Muse Mais un Troupeau de Muets. In 2018, she created Palsembleu with Thibaut de Raymond.
Anna Gaïotti is a member of the group vierge noire with Léo Dupleix and Sigolène Valax. Together, they create the performances Bal des Laze (2019), Les Antécédentes (2020) and A Kiss Without Lips (2021). She performs as a duo with Jean-Luc Guionnet and Pascal Battus (TTTT), and joins Ensemble UN in 2019-20. From 2014 to 2020, she collaborates with Laura Sellies and Amélie Giacomini, for whom she performs and choreographs (installations, films). She also works with Mark Tompkins, Phia Ménard and Tatiana Julien.
Her performative, musical and performance work is supported by venues such as la Ménagerie de Verre, la Soufflerie, le GMEM, le Gmea, Kunstencentrum BUDA, la Rose des Vents, Montévidéo, the NEXT, Artdanthé, Bruitisme and Musica festivals, and tours alternative stages in Europe and Japan.
Involved with the Performing Arts Forum, she co-organizes one-off events: Indigo Dance Festival (2014-2016), Circus and Spiral (2017-2019).
Her poetry is published by Échappée Belle. Anna Gaïotti is an associate artist at La Soufflerie. - www.annagaiotti.com
Christophe Cardoen
Born in 1966. Lives and works in Grenoble.
Christophe Cardoen creates and presents light installations. He uses light, movement and sound to create devices, lighting, objects and spaces.
In performances, he plays with light with musicians and filmmakers, actors and dancers, practicing improvisation.
He uses light and shadow as materials in their own right. By associating electromechanical devices, shutters or reflective surfaces with light sources, he provokes variations in rhythm, scansions of bright light in deep darkness, and tests our visual perceptions of time and place.
A living, organic light that reacts instantaneously to actions on stage, revealing as much as it conceals.
Resident at Le Brise Glace from 1995 to 2008, he also helped organize Le 102 in Grenoble from 1995 to 2015.
He is a member of the improvisation ensemble Le Un. He has collaborated with a number of musicians: Martine Altenburger, Pascal Battus, Benoit Cancoin, Angelica Castello, Fabrice Charles, Xavier Charles, David Chiesa, Anna-Maria Civico, Michel Doneda, Will Guthrie, Eddy Kowalsky, Thierry Madiot, Lionel Marchetti, Seijiro Murayama, Natacha Muslera, Jérôme Noetinger, Frédéric Nogrey, Lee Patterson, Emmanuel Petit, Marc Pichelin, Anne Laure Pigache, Anne Julie Rollet, Mathieu Werchowski....
As well as with dancers, actors and comedians: Marie Cambois, Fine Kwiatkowski, Michel Mathieu, Nanda Mohammad, Michel Raji, Stefano Taiuti, Li-Ping Ting...
Visual artists: Liz Racz, Emilie Ibanez, Miles McKane, Kristof Guez, Stéphane Lempereur, Sebastien Perroux, Christophe Auger, Patrick Bokanowski, Etienne Caire, Djamila Daddi-Addoun, Willehad Grafenhorst, Kamel Maad, Marie Moreau, Lionel Palun, Xavier Quérel, Gaëlle Rouard, Fredérique Roumagne...
Nina Garcia
guitar
Anna Gaïotti
tap dance
Romain Simon
drums
Jennifer Caubet
sculptures
lights
Étienne Foyer
sound