Launched in 2020, Ircam's Musiques-Fictions collection offers a unique literary and sound experience, combining a contemporary text with a musical creation, in an immersive broadcasting system....
Installed under Ircam's 49-speaker ambisonic diffusion dome, reconstituted in the GMEM Module, the listener is invited to listen to a sound environment with extensive expressive possibilities, reproducing a listening situation close to that of the real world, from the great spectacular stage to the most minute details of intimate discourse.
This Music-Fiction entitled "Le Sentiment du monde" is an adaptation of Robert Linhart's "L'Établi", about the few hundred intellectual activists who, from 1967 onwards, took up residence in factories and docks.
Robert Linhart was one of them, spending a year as a worker at the Citroën plant in Choisy. Ten years later, he decided to tell his own story. Poignant and precise, this account reveals production relationships, surveillance systems, repression and the unequal balance of power between managers and workers, whether French or immigrant.
L'Établi is also the cobbled-together workbench where an old worker tinkers with irregular doors before they go into assembly. Today, L'Établi brings together composer Roque Rivas and director Julia Vidit.
Production
Ircam-Centre Pompidou
Support
Sacem
Based on
"L'Établi" by Robert Linhart © Éditions de Minuit
In partnership with
la Friche la Belle de Mai
Adaptation of Robert Linhart's "L'Établi" from the chapters "La Grève" and "Le Sentiment du monde".
"From a sound point of view, I chose to accompany this text - powerful in its political and social statements - with atmospheres that evoke the places and situations in which the action takes place. These can be vast, outdoor spaces (the factory, the street, etc.) or small, indoor spaces (the café). It is within these spaces that I reconstruct and articulate, using samples, the sound effects of the various events in the story. This approach, which might be considered "naturalistic", is in fact far more ambiguous. It aims to evoke memory and the relationship with time, fundamental dimensions of the text. While the text tells us about a specific historical episode, the sound atmosphere creates a timeless setting. The two chapters of the text have a contrasting rhythmicity and breath. The dynamic first part reveals a race against time, with moments of suspense, as the strike progresses. The sounds of machines, workers and other factory noises articulate the narrative.
The second part, slower, open, with a dilated temporality and sonority, explores introspection.
I designed the overall sonic color of the piece, referring to the materiality of metal, so present in the Citroën factory.
This dense sonority, sometimes bright and strident, other times opaque and dark, highlights the expressive and emotional aspects of the text. Spatial writing follows the transformations of place and narrative. Voice placement is rather restrained. Nevertheless, the various memories evoked by the author take their place in this reconstituted space, creating atmospheres of varying density and scope that recall the feeling of a vanished world. "
- Roque Rivas
"Robert Linhart's text walks a fine line: he writes from both an intimate and a political point of view about his past experience of the Establishment. When I read it, I'm faced with a historical account of a 20th-century automobile production system, and with the extreme sensitivity of a man who sees, within this framework, the injustice and profound inequality between men. To translate this reading sensation into a sound work, I chose to bring together two chapters of the book: "La grève" and "Le Sentiment du monde". Set against each other, as if in mirror image, these two distinct times experienced by the narrator describe two ways of experiencing the struggle. There's the collective, exhausting strike against the unfair recovery of working hours imposed by the bosses. Day by day, hour by hour, in the din of the assembly line, the Citroën anti-strike machine is set in motion, rising up against the strikers and undermining them. Later, punished for his active role in the struggle, he meets an obscure brother. Together, they bond over a day's work. Despite their class and cultural differences, a sense of recognition emerges. A deep, complex, infini feeling emerges, in this inhuman context. A feeling of the world, irresolvable, that is perhaps consoled by this kind of encounter.
Robert Linhart's voice is one, because he is the only witness to his experience. Hassam Ghancy's voice alone will carry his words, bridging the gap between 1967 and today, between the author and us. Putting this text into words means spatializing memories to make them a shared, collective memory. My hope is that we will be able to hear a narrative that is missing from our history, one that conjures up objects, ghosts and systems that are still all too present.
- Julia Vidit
Robert Linhart
Author
Born in Nice in 1944, Robert Linhart studied philosophy at Normale Sup rue d'Ulm, where, in 1966, he founded the Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes before forming the Gauche prolétarienne with Benny Lévy. In May 68, he was hospitalized for depression before deciding to "settle down" as a worker at Citroën. In 1978, he published a book about this experience, "L'Établi" (Minuit). In 1981, after a suicide attempt and a deep coma, he fell into a long period of silence, from which he did not emerge until the turn of the 2010s. He was a lecturer in sociology at the Université Paris VIII-Saint Denis. He is also the author of "Lénine, les paysans, Taylor : essai d'analyse matérialiste historique de la naissance du système productif soviétique", Paris, Le Seuil, 1976 and "Le Sucre et la Faim : enquête dans les régions sucrières du Nord-Est brésilien", Paris, Minuit.
Roque Rivas
Composer
Born in Santiago de Chile in 1975, Roque Rivas studied electroacoustic composition and computer music at the Conservatoire national supérieur musique et danse de Lyon, before joining Emmanuel Nunes' advanced composition class at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris. From 2006 to 2008, he attended the two-year Cursus de composition et d'informatique musicale at Ircam, where he studied with Yan Maresz. As part of his training, he also took part in the composition course at the Centre Acanthes in 2004, under the direction of Jonathan Harvey and Philippe Manoury, then in the Atelier Opéra en création at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in 2011, under the direction of composer and conductor Peter Eötvös. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including1st prize at the Bourges International Music Competition (IMEB) in the Electroacoustic Music and Electronic Arts category, and the Giga-Hertz Preis für Elektronische Musik from the ZKM and SWR ExperimentalStudio. In 2005, the Francis and Mica Salabert Foundation awarded him the annual prize for the composition department of the Conservatoire national supérieur musique et danse de Lyon. During the period 2015-2016, Roque Rivas was a resident at the Académie de France in Madrid, Casa de Velázquez, from 2017 to 2018 at the Académie de France in Rome, Villa Médicis and from 2021 to 2022 at the Villa Albertine in New York. His works are played by ensembles and performers such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Asko|Schoenberg, Ictus, Remix, L'Itinéraire, Les cris de Paris, Les Métaboles, and are presented at major international festivals. His works are published by Durand (Universal Music Publishing).
Julia Vidit
Director
Julia Vidit trained at the École-Théâtre du Passage and then at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique. Her theater credits include Shakespeare, Marivaux, Corneille, Genet, Mishima, Vinaver and Carole Fréchette, under the direction of Ludovic Lagarde, Victor Gaultier-Martin, Jean-Baptiste Sastre, Edward Bond, Alain Ollivier and Jacques Vincey. In 2006, she founded the Java Vérité company and directed Pierre Desproges' "Mon cadavre sera piégé". This was followed by productions of Musset's "Fantasio" (2009), Emanuel Bémer's musical "Bon gré Mal gré" (2010), Thomas Bernhard's "Le Faiseur de Théâtre" (2014), Ivan Viripaev's "Illusions" (2015), Guillaume Cayet's "Dernières Pailles" (2018), Corneille's "Le Menteur" (2017) and Brãnimir Scepanovic's "La Bouche pleine de terre" (2021). Since 2014, she has been collaborating with author - playwright Guillaume Cayet, to whom she has commissioned short forms "Le Menteur 2.0" (2017), "Skolstrejk" (2019) and participatory forms such as "La Grande Illusion" (2016). She is associated with several accredited venues: Scènes Vosges - Scène Conventionnée d'Épinal (2011-2013), ACB-Scène Nationale de Bar-le-Duc (2014-2018), CDN Nancy Lorraine (2017-2018), Le Carreau-Scène nationale de Forbach (2018-2019).
On January1, 2021, Julia Vidit takes over the direction of Théâtre de la Manufacture, CDN Nancy Lorraine. In July 2021, she will create "Pour Quoi Faire?" by Marilyn Mattei on tour, and in March 2022 will create "C'est comme ça (si vous voulez)" in Nancy, after Luigi Pirandello.
Augustin Muller
Computer music director
Specializing in computer music and sound diffusion, Augustin Muller works with various artists and ensembles (Le Balcon, Ensemble intercontemporain, L'Instant Donné, Links, International Contemporary Ensemble...) for concerts and festivals. Coming from a generation directly confronted with the question of interpreting mixed repertoire, he has been working at Ircam since 2010 on concert, research and creation projects with numerous composers (Levinas, Platz, Carreño, Fourès, Eldar), musicians and performers, and is involved in several sound diffusion and live electronics projects, notably with the Le Balcon orchestra.
Friche la Belle de Mai (the Module)
41 Jobin Street13003
Marseille
RATES
Full: 8€
Reduced: 6€ *
* Young people aged 12 - 25, students, jobseekers, recipients of minimum social benefits, intermittent workers, seniors aged 65 and over - with proof.
Pass Musiques-Fictions * : 10€
* giving access to two sessions on the same day: Music-Fiction 8 + Musique-Fiction 9 on Thursday May 8
DURATION
45 min.
Robert Linhart
text
Roque Rivas
music
Julia Vidit
adaptation
Augustin Muller
computer music production Ircam
Oscar Ferran
sound engineering
with the voice of
Hassam Ghancy
music recorded by
Mathieu Steffanus (clarinet)