The ensemble HANATSUmiroir, created in Strasbourg in 2010 by Ayako Okubo and Olivier Maurel, develops a certain conception of the contemporary music performance, associating to the musical creation, the scenography, the video, the dance, the plastic arts, the light creation, the theater or the poetry. Since then, HANATSUmiroir has initiated numerous commissions in order to experiment with new formats of representation and listening to music.

What is contemporary music? What is experimental music? How can we clearly name singular forms of writing, without creating borders that artificially oppose them? Scholarly, academic music? Experimental, open music?

The questions that Ayako Okubo and Olivier Maurel raise could only intersect with those that animate us in Hémisphère son: to re-interrogate musical writing (at the table, on the stage, improvised ...) as much as the formats of representations of music (indoor, outdoor, collective, interactive, virtual ...).

All tracks that theensemble HANATSUmiroir, accompanied by the double bass player Louis Siracusa Schneider and surrounded by Maxime Kurvers explores with the composer Elsa Biston through a new creation : Attentifs, ensemble

Attentifs, ensemble is a listening experience and a concert situation, which attempts to bring the attention of the listeners together, in order to experience the strength of a common perception. It is a reflection on music as a creator of links which is lived during a collective experience; which intensifies the relationship to the present, which builds a common history by inviting us to be demanding, together, to the quality of our attention to the world.

Indeed, how can we feel the concert as an inclusive and welcoming place, where we " make music " together according to the beautiful expression of Christopher Small? A space where shared listening creates connections, relationships - relationships between musicians, between musicians and listeners, between musicians and sound.
Where " music-making is about relationships between people, between people and the rest of the cosmos, and perhaps also with ourselves, our bodies, and sometimes even the supernatural world - if we believe. "

Attention is a political and collective issue. It is what connects us to reality, it is what allows us to build a common, shareable reality. However, it is at the same time a commercial object and the field of a permanent war. It is urgent to become aware that this attention is a common good that must be cultivated, defended and preserved, and that it is the foundation of our power to act on the world around us.

Sound informs us about the state of things and beings.
It creates a relationship between two people or groups of people; it is the vector of an attention to the world - to the nothings, to the little nothings, to the details, to the complexity, to the thickness of a situation - to the motives, to the intentions, to the sensitivities; it is the vector of an attention which rhymes with a form of availability to reality, of empathy.

The device that articulates the show is thus that of a guided listening: sentences are projected on a screen, which propose to the participants different ways of listening. The writing of the piece is a braiding between these sentences and the music or the actions of the performers. Thus the musicians and the spectators, through their listening, activated by the proposals of this silent "voice", are linked in the same form of which they become equal actors.

The "voice" will borrow from composers, thinkers, musicians who have thought about listening, in the form of theoretical phrases or concrete and pictorial proposals: quotations from John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, John Corbett, Alexander Baumgarten or Hildegard Westerkamp who tells us that " Western aesthetics separates musical experience from its context. When someone is moved in this sense, they are moved inside, intimately, privately, as an individual.

This conception of music as an objective entity is thus accompanied by an individualization of the listening - thus even at the concert, the emotion is not shared between the members of the public, it does not pass by the feeling of the collective; on the side of the musicians, that the public is there or not, it is more or less the same. But for Makis Solomos " this conception of music tends to depoliticize the listening in the first sense of the term, that is to say to take it out of the sphere of the polis ".

Indeed, with phonographic reproduction, the work is detachable from the context of its hearing, and it is possible to listen to it in a domestic context; then to carry it with us in our movements, everywhere, in order to build a bubble, a territory which separates us from the external world. The use of cell phones has transformed music into a tool for isolating ourselves in public spaces and we are losing the habit of reading what surrounds us and our contact with the world.

On the other hand, in Attentifs, ensemblethe question of a music which would develop, would allow an attention to the world and the conscience to share a common space is raised. This music cannot be reduced to an object - recordable and transportable for example. We will listen together, musician and audience will observe each other in this collective experience where we will try to better perceive what is at stake in the attention and in the listening.

Attentifs ensemble is a collective experience of attention.
An invitation to synchronize our listening, through a projection of sentences, suggestions, quotations that propose different ways of listening.

With :
Elsa Biston : electronics, Ayako Okubo : double bass flute, Olivier Maurel : percussions, Louis Siracusa-Schneider : double bass, Maxime Kurvers : collaboration to the scenic device, Raphaël Siefert, Léa Kreutzer : lights

Coproductions : Hémisphère son-Paysages Humains, La Pop-Incubateur artistique et citoyen Paris, le Centre Culturel André Malraux, Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, le GMEM - Centre national de création musicale, Marseille

Rendez-vous :
- April 5 and 6, 2023 at 7:30 pm at La Pop - 61 Quai de la Seine, 75019 Paris
- May 20, 2023 at 5 pm at Festival Musique Action - Centre Culture André Malraux - Esplanade Jack Ralite, 3 Rue de Parme, 54500 Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy.

The HANATSUmiroir ensemble is the winner of the 2022 Regional Prize for gender equality awarded by the Grand-Est Region.