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Aurélien Dumont calls on one of his favourite authors, Lutz Bassmann, alias Antoine Volodine, in his eponymous work Black Village, a musical theatre directed by Frédéric Sonntag, who invites an actress and six musicians on stage.
There is a lot going on on the Ile de France stages in the autumn of 2021, where multidisciplinary shows combining rich and original proposals are multiplying. In Black Village, as in The Stealths or La Vallée de l'étonnement, the aim is to combine text and music, words and sounds, in what is known as musical theatre. For each of the productions, a reflection and options are undertaken to bring these two temporal entities to life together: by inscribing the text on its sound environment (The Valley of Astonishment), by allowing the spoken word to enter the tempo of the music(Les furtifs), or, as the composer Aurélien Dumont intends in Black Village, by investing the spaces left by the text, gaps that are conducive to a music that would have kept its trace.
In Lutz Bassmann's Black Village , three characters, Tassili, Goodmann and Myriam, walk through the darkness that follows their death. This is a world without light, where they face the darkness but also the vagaries of time, because time does not flow regularly. It stretches or shrinks, but above all it stops. In an attempt to establish landmarks in their journey, these wandering souls tell themselves stories, but these stories stop without reason: Volodine 's "narrats" become "interruptas"...
Included in Frédéric Sonntag's staging, the six instrumentalists occupy the stage, piano and string trio in the garden, percussion set and flutes (soprano, alto and bass) in the court. The musicians of L'Instant donné - who will be celebrating their twentieth anniversary next year - play without a conductor, practising mutual listening and a fusion of energy that compels admiration.
A curtain imitating the walls of a very old wall surrounds the back of the stage and lets the light filter through. Neon lights, bulbs and other light sources (the saving flame of the lighters operated by the musicians) are at work to serve the narrative and contribute to the dreamlike quality as much as to the intensity of the story: as in this overexposed scene where the large drum installed in the centre of the stage resounds under the batons of Maxime Echardour, an instrument of the trance referring to the powers of the shaman mentioned in the last story.
A bewitching presence with a beautifully timbred voice, the actress Hélène Alexandridis shines alongside the musicians who, more often than not, remain silent and attentive to her. Skilled in modulating and projecting her voice according to her interlocutors - a persiflage tone for the phantasmagorical bird, scowling or authoritative, depending on the situation - she tells one gory story after another, between sadism and black humour, the butcher's story, for example, at the end of which Maxime Echardour brandishes two huge knives whose clash grips us.
For the music begins where the stories end, a music that nevertheless allows for intersections with the text, at the moment when the actress begins a new story or during the occasional interventions, often peppered with humour, that the subject brings up. This trace left by the story in our musician's imagination is expressed in terms of suggestive timbres and singular energy that take the listener to other horizons: such as the playful and very energetic kazoo "little concert" after the frightening story of the murderous bird. Aurélien Dumont seeks out the noisy quality of music that makes use of extensive playing techniques and rare instruments, such as the one that the percussionist insistently echoes under our ears. The piano is prepared and often played in the strings by Caroline Cren, creating small looping figures with the neighbouring bows, while Mayu Sato-Brémaud's flute(s) play more in percussive mode. It is impossible to describe the meticulous engineering that animates this singular universe, which enchants us and whose complexity and infinite delicacy the musicians render to perfection.
Black Village is a fascinating show, as much for the flavour of its story as for the wonder of its music, which sublimates its dreamlike space.
Michèle Tosi
Nouveau Théâtre de Montreuil on 29-11-2021
Aurélien Dumont (born 1980): Black Village; a project proposed by L'Instant Donné, based on a text by Lutz Bassmann (Antoine Volodine); directed by Frédéric Sonntag; lighting design by Manuel Desfeux; set design, costumes, accessories by Juliette Seigneur. Hélène Alexandridis, actress; musicians of L'Instant Donné: Elsa Balas, viola; Nicolas Carpentier, cello; Caroline Cren, piano; Maxime Echardour, percussion; Saori Furukawa, violin; Mayu Sato-Brémaud, flute.
