aperghis | hans op de beeck, bruno hardt, klaas verpoest

| charles perrault | ictus     Happy End

 

 

 

 

 

Happy End: an encounter

 

 

 

The project Happy End is the result of a remarkable artistic triangle: the French composer Georges Aperghis, the Belgian visual artists Hans Op de Beeck, Bruno Hardt and Klaas Verpoest and a tale by Charles Perrault (Tom Thumb, Le Petit Poucet).

 

 

1 aperghis

In France the name of Georges Aperghis is clearly associated with musical theatre . Since more than twenty years he has built up an impressive catalogue of solo works, chamber music pieces, oratorios, operas, all of which tie the voice to aspects of movement and image.

 

He invented a form of music theatre defining it as follows: the invasion of the theatrical temple by the abstract power of musical organization. Not lyrics set to music but a polyphonic encoding of actions, images, music, spurts of words and song pushed to a high level of profusion; the opening of multiple drawers, the shock of multiple fragments - very stubborn, very insistent -gradually sculpting a mental area with tiny snips of scissors.

 

There is a sort of primitivism in his work, a strong impression of the first time: a language inventing and reinventing itself, stammering, searching for itself and developing through trial and error in an expressiveness that is too soft or overcharged by turns. It is often funny and ferocious.

 

Seen up close, his musical scores are in balance with the overall project. They jolt along, jump forward - stalling, restarting, slightly jammed. Tiny, slippery intervals, harmonic standstill, little molecular dances and shivers crossed here and there by major catastrophes.

 

In his famous Rcitations for soprano he explores the foundations of language and the intimate connection between music and human pulsation.

 

With  Machinations  (2000) and  Paysage sous Surveillance  (2002), Aperghis did succeed to manipulate live-video and small security cameras in his own way. Together with Henri Pousseur, Vinko Globokar and Mauricio Kagel he is a pioneer of the so-called  total polyphony : multi-layered, multiply narrative, researching surprising accidentals through the abundance of the material. he is in essence a real director with an infinite concern for detail and understanding for the art of making material circulate in order to use the maximum potential of his collaborators.

 

 

His collaborators are often young artists, strong personalities far from his daily habitat: he lives to be surprised and dies to widen his circle of influence. Thats why this collaboration features Hans Op de Beeck and Bruno Hardt. The digital animation of the pencil drawings is created by Klaas Verpoest in close collaboration with the artists.

 

 

 

2 Op de Beeck, Hardt and Verpoest
Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck (1969) creates huge, life-sized installations, imaginary urban sites on scale, video installations, sculptures, photos, drawings and animated films. His universe is bathing in a gentle desolation, an ironic solitude. A calm exploration of a universe rather than a rejection of a cruel world: in exile, out of place, without objection, waiting for something that will not happen, inhabitants of silently collapsing cities.
The artist has for several years been involved in many individual projects and group shows in quick succession. His work has been shown throughout Europe, Asia and the States. In 2002-2003 he was artist in residence at MoMA-PS1 in New York. At Art Unlimited 2004 (Art Basel) he showed a life-sized motorway restaurant, overviewing a nightly motorway, while this year Art Unlimited 2007 will host his life-sized evocation of a small, nightly, snowed under amusement fair. 
 
Website: http://www.hansopdebeeck.com

Link : Martin Herbert for Art Forum, 2005

 

 

 

3 the tale of Perrault

Charles Perrault (1628-1703) was a member of the Acadmie Franaise and a leading intellectual of his time. Ironically, his dialogue Parallles des anciens et des modernes (Parallels between the Ancients and the Moderns), 1688-1697, which compared the authors of antiquity unfavorably to modern writers, served as a forerunner for the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, an era that was not always receptive to tales of magic and fantasy.

Perrault could have not predicted that his reputation for future generations would rest almost entirely on a slender book published in 1697 containing eight simple stories with the unassuming title: Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals, with the added title in the frontispiece, Tales of Mother Goose.

 

Tom thumb, not taller than a thumb, is the youngest of seven brothers. Their parents, under pressure for their pauper finaltail situation, want to abandon them all in the forest, but Tom thumb leaves white pebbles and so all brothers can find their way back home. Unwillingly again, their parents bring them back to the forest, successfully this time because, instead of stones, Tom thumb has left bread crusts which brids have eaten. So he and his seven brothers are left all alone in the forest. An ogre takes them prisonners to his castle, but once again, Tom thumb manages to save them all by taking the ogre's giant boots and get back home.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

multimedia disposition –

the treatement of the tale

 

Disposition

- A large video screen (as for film viewing)

- An ensemble of fourteen musicians all placed below the screen

- A conductor responsible for the synchronisation between music and image.

- A light amplification set-up enabling panning (in the concert hall), pre-recorded voice-off (who tells the tale). IRCAM has proposed the possibility to work with Time, a set of speakers with a unique localisation, but able to diffuse in all directions with the assistance of a panning device.

 

A history of loss

 Tom thumb as told by Aperghis will avoid nostalgic images of la Douce France. He will not try to re-establish a lost imaginary of old tales; instead he will emphasize the cruel nature of the story: its about a research, a collecting of material – and maybe it will end up as in ancient times in loss, through wandering in the labyrinth. Aperghis has the vision of a Tom thumb in an unlimited stat of uncertainty, in between abandon and encounter with the monster. In between nothing and prey.

 

In bewteen media : a certain floating.

This type of multimedia encounter is not about fusion but rather about happy coincidence, about trouble, about alternating crossroads and connections;

 

The film by Hans Op de Beeck, Bruno Hardt and Klaas Verpoest is based on an extensive amount of large scale pencil drawings, created by Hans Op de Beeck and Bruno Hardt. The digital animation of these pencil drawings is created by Klaas Verpoest.

 

The instrumental music will follow his own rhythmic logic, respecting the frontal code of opera and cinema. 

 

The voice (voice off) will be situated off stage, panned in the concert hall, on a clearly other stage than the image. The different episodes of the text, pre-recorded, will be triggered by a synthesizer. This will enable to prepare different versions of the tale in different languages. The original character of the tale will be respected in the different languages.

 

 

 

 

bio | georges aperghis : composer

 

 

GEORGES APERGHIS was born in Athens, Greece, in 1945.  After training – basically on his own – as a painter and musician, he moved to Paris, where he met Xenakis.  He then discovered the world of theatre, to which he has become irrevocably bound, became Antoine Vitezs partner and founded the music and theatre company ATEM (Atelier Thtre et Musique).  His music and stage universe, which is both meticulous and off-beat, comic and tragic, strong and weak, has turned his works into the hub from which all French musical theatre necessarily takes its references.
Georges Aperghis has composed seven operas based on the texts of Jules Verne, Diderot, Freud, Edgar Allan Poe and Claude Levi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, 1996).
Ictus has recorded his Hamletmaschine-Oratorio for Cyprs.  This recording won the prize for the best CD awarded by the Charles Cros Academy in 2002.  The next Aperghis-Ictus joint undertaking will be called Tempte (Tempest) or Avis de Tempte (Storm Warning) and will premiere at the Lille Opera House in 2004.

 

 Aperghis a certainement acquis la libert de se placer sur le fil de laccrobate, de risquer la chute. Mais la diffrence de certains autres, il sait que quand laccrobate tombe, il ne tombe pas dans le vide, il tombe sur dautres fils, auquel cas il peut sauter, dautant plus !! Le danger, on peut le ngocier, on peut jouer avec, le mettre en horizon, en faire un point de ligne de fuite. Chez lui, il est toujours l, il rmerge sans cesse, toute occasion, chaque fois que sont introduits des lments diruption, non pas pour crer des points de rupture avec la chaine de complexit formelle, mais pour amener dautres matires dexpression. 

Felix Guattari

 

 

 

bio | op de beeck, hardt, verpoest : film

 

Hans Op de Beeck : born in 1969, Turnhout, Belgium

1992-1996:           Masters Degree  in Visual Arts, Higher Institute Sint-Lukas, Brussels, Grand Distinction;

participant at The Higher Institute for Fine Arts-Flanders, Antwerp (post-program)

1998-1999: participant at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (post-program)

1999: winner of the Urit Prize, Amsterdam

2001: winner of the (multi-disciplinary) prize  Prix de la Jeune Peinture Belge 2001, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels

2002-2003:           participant for Belgium at the PS-1 Studio Program, New York

 
The plastician Bruno Hardt, also teacher at the St. Hogeschool in Brussels, since a long time building an oeuvre consisting of figurative series of paintings, drawings and sculptures. In his images he starts from everyday subjects and situations, with on the one hand romantic elements and pathos and on the otherhand an undertone of insecurities, gaps and doubts about perception.

 The young videast Klaas Verpoest is working on contemporary digital montage and production techniques and on producing live motion graphics. For several years he was active in a collective De Filmfabriek. During the last couple of years he realized video for a number of interactive installations and also live videographism for literary programs. At this moment he is working with the experimental collective Blanckq, where through live improvisations he searches for interfaces with plastic arts and contemporary experimental music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ictus & georges-lie octors, interprtation

 

 

ictus  is a Bussels based contemporary-music ensemble housed in the buildings of the dance company Rosas since 1994. While their repertoire covers a large stylistic range (from Aperghis to Reich, from Murail to Waits), each of their concerts presents a coherent and adventurous listening experience: thematic concerts (around transcriptions, time stratified, nocturnes, irony, music and film, Loops...), portrait concerts (of Jonathan Harvey, Fausto Romitelli, Toshio Hosokawa...), stage productions (operas, ballets, tours de chant). Apart from performing at some of the most prestigeous venues and festivals such as Musica Strasbourg, Witten, Brooklyn Academy of Music, le Festival d'Automne Paris, Royaumont, Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, Wien-Modern, Ictus presents an annual series of concerts in Brussels in collaboration with the Palais des Beaux-Arts and the Kaaitheater, popular with large and varied audiences while continuing to add to its collection of CDs of which ten are currently available (view catalogue on www.ictus.be). Ictus has hosted three seminars for young composers since 2000 and has been in residence at the Lille Opera since 2003

 

 

Georges-Elie Octors (1947) studied at the Academy of Brussels, where since 1982 he is also a teacher. He started his career as a soloist in the National Orchestra of Belgium in 1969. He was a member of the ensemble Musiques Nouvelles (Luik,Belgium) in 1970 where in 1976 he became director until 1991. Between 1980 and 1996 he was also active in the administration of the Centre de Recherches Musicales de Wallonie. From 1977 on, he was regularly invited as a conductor by several symphonic, chamber and contemporary music formations in Belgium and in foreign places (e.g. Orch. Philharmonique de Lige, Orch. de la Radio Irlandaise, Orch. Symphonique de la RTBF, Orch. de Bretagne, Orch. de chambre du T.R.M., Orch. International des Jeunesses Musicales, Beethoven Acadmie, ensemble Musique Vivante Paris and Musique Oblique Paris) He was advisor of the dance departement at the Opera of Brussels in 1992 and between 1992 and 1999 chairman of Jeunesses Musicales du Brabant Wallon. In 1993 he became conductor of the ensemble Ictus and created, together with others, the quartet Ictus (piano/percussion). He teached music analysis at P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios). He conducted first performances of pieces written by many Belgian and foreign composers (Saariaho, Jarrel, Gaudibert, Francesconi, Bartholomee, Boesmans, Pousseur, Ledoux, Foccroulle, De Jaer, De Mey) and is regularly invited at famous european Festivals in Paris (IRCAM), Avignon, Holland Festival, Vienne, Barcelona, Lisabon) and foreign festivals in the United States, Canada, Brasili, Japan

 

 

Ictus : multimedia experience

 

 

with Rosas, 1994-2004: 7 dance and dance theater productions
 

Silent Movies, 1998, 2000, Kaaitheater: a selection of silent movies with newly written scores by young composers. Synchronisation with the image by the conductor.
 

Erik Satie / Luis Bunuel, 1996: Entracte by Ren Clair/Erik Satie, Un Chien Andalou by Bunuel/Matalon.
 

Aventures, Nouvelles Aventures, 1999: Non sensical oratoria by Ligeti, directed by choreographer Pierre Droulers, and staged Jim Clayburgh of The Wooster Group.
 

Georges Aperghis, Paysage Sous Surveillance,  2002:  Hiener Mller's text (Bildbeschreibung) becomes a total nightmare in Aperghis staging. Live Video and Scenography:  FilmFabriek (Kurt D'Haeseleer for the videos; Peter Missotten). With Johanne Saunier (dancer) and Jos Houben (actor).
 

Fausto Romitelli & Paolo Pacchini, Index of Metals, 2003: a video opera or a light-show as the composer called it. Three screens, synchronized music, line up mixing classical and pop instrumentation.
 

Counter Phrases, 2003: Project realized within the ECHO network by Thierry De Mey. Ten dance films by Rosas-De Keersmaeker, and original soundtracks written by Georges Aperghis, Thierry De Mey, Robin de Raaff, Luca Francesconi, Jonathan Harvey, Toshio Hosokawa, Magnus Lindberg, Steve Reich, Fausto Romitelli, Stefan Van Eycken
 

Sur les bords de la Camra, 2004: New series of silent movies with live music, performed by a soloist + electronics (first series of composers: Alvarez, Finsterer, Hayden).
 

Avis de Tempte, 2005: Scenic catastrophy by Georges Aperghis et Peter Szendy; with IRCAM, for the operas of Lille and Nancy.
 

Wozzeck, by Alban Berg, 2006: Chamber music version by John Rea, directed by Jean-Franois Sivadier for the Opra de Lille.
 

Wagner Dream, 2007, by Jonathan Harvey on a libretto by Jean-Claude Carrire, directed by Pierre Audi, new opera.