IRCAM - "Machinations"

"Machinations" is a ‘musical spectacle’ with four female performers, a man, a computer and video projectors.

The female performers consist of a singer (Donatienne Michel-Dansac), a violinist (Geneviève Strosser), a flautist (Sylvie Sacoun) and an actress (Sylvie Levesque), though they all assume a different and unfamiliar role here: standing behind illuminated tables, they exclaim phonemes, gesticulate and project elemental objects representing the former. The male performer (Olivier Pasquet) intervenes with the computer, sometimes in support of and sometimes in competition with the others, creating an audiovisual dialogue with the actions of the four women.

The work’s texts were written by the composer and his erstwhile collaborator, the philosophy professor and author, François Regnault. That said, they are not actually texts, but rather ‘pre-texts’ which, though meaningless, still have communicational power: they represent in abbreviated form the story of the birth of language, as a code of communication, out of Protean sounds and primeval noises. In the same way, the juxtaposition of simple objects and computer programs represents the story of the birth of science and ‘machines’.