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Léo Collin is a French composer, performer, visual artist and scriptwriter. He works in Zurich and creates projects, both large and small, with his company Kollectiv International Totem. Between music and theater, installation, performance and participatory dimension, the collective relies on the transversality of genres, the springs of technology and a good dose of imagination to make us see and listen differently.
Léo Collin, your company Kollektiv international totem is still relatively unknown in France. Can you tell us about it?
The company is based in Zurich, a city that has welcomed us since our debut in 2015 and enables us to make a living from our artistic activity. It's true that we don't export much; our presence at the Archipel festival in Geneva, where we opened with Corals, une station-service, is almost an exception in the flow of our activities.
A few words about the name of your company?
We're eight permanent members, from the four corners of the earth; I wanted the name to emphasize this openness to the world, to languages and cultures; so I chose three terms which, in one way or another, refer to the same thing: a gathering of people who pool their energy and ideas, who vibrate together but are not from the same corner. We all come from musical backgrounds and play an instrument (saxophone, horn, flute, piano, percussion, etc.). However, we make experimental theater where music, or rather sound art, permeates our approach.
You are a French pianist and composer. What is your background?
Originally, I'm more of a visual artist! I passed my baccalauréat in applied arts in Besançon and then in Marseille, and then switched to the world of music. I was a late starter on the piano and discovered the great classical repertoire at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Lyon, a period of intensive learning combined with composition studies (electroacoustic and instrumental) which seemed to suit me better. I finalized my training as a composer at the HEM in Geneva with Michael Jarrell, and attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses and the Donaueschingen Festival, two mythical venues for contemporary music where you can embrace all the currents of sound creation, including conceptual music. I then decided to learn German and move to Zurich, a city that boasts one of Europe's largest academies (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste/Zurich University of the Arts), bringing together design, film, fine arts, music, dance, theater, transdisciplinarity and communication of the arts and design: a place that, for me, values this crossover of practices and this decompartmentalization of genres that I'm looking for.
At Geneva's Maison Communale de Plainpalais, we witnessed a four-hour "performative installation" featuring actors/musicians, set design, video, electronics and smartphones, one of your most ambitious creations to date. How did Corals, une station-servicecome about ?
The idea for the service station came to me from a book of dubious taste(Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman) that fascinated me when I was a teenager. It tells of the presence in a service station of a guru who transcends the banality of the place, taking its occupants out of their daily tasks and gestures and into another, more exhilarating and beautiful reality. I went on to read many stories about service stations to fuel my own. Through the figures of the store's four employees - the cashier, the surface technician, the security guard and the convenience store attendant - all in precarious situations, I became interested in the phenomenon of stereotypy: those automatic gestures and acts linked to a particular context that each of the characters performs without thinking about it, such as the systematic labeling of the cartons that arrive in large numbers in the store, accompanied by its audible signal. I wanted to express the idea that you can always break the bars of the "prison" in which you're trapped. While Kay assumes her role as cashier, her voice mutates (via autotune) and her space-time changes when she starts chatting with her community on the Internet. I play the role of the floor cleaner, dreaming of heights and transcendence. Equipped with sound sensors placed on the joints of my legs, I spend my free time stretching and contorting (to make noise!); I explore the high volutes of the colonnades with my broom, or play with a small remote-controlled helicopter in which I dream of taking flight: all metaphors for a possible utopia in a place with no future.
Video plays an important role in the staging?
Several screens are installed above the cardboard set, multiplying the space and altering the scenic perspective through the zoom effects of live video. We also simultaneously witness what's going on outside the auditorium, in the corridors of the Salle Communale de Plainpalais, where a grand piano takes pride of place. The multi-channel screen also invites us to lift our gaze and forget the everyday, thanks to the immersive flow of images bringing back nature and the forest which, it is said, once occupied the site of the gas station.
How does the music interact with the protagonists?
The sound environment, the noisy sequences and even the concert of instruments are an integral part of the narrative. My vacuum cleaner also generates white noise, as does the exhaust pipe of the cardboard car, which sends out jets of smoke. I asked a computer scientist to invent a talking coffee machine, concealing a sampler that reacts to the pressure of the keys. I like to take everyday objects and transform them. The mechanic is also at the controls of the projection console, the security guard, always on the alert, manipulates bird calls and a number of small percussion instruments, bells, bowls, small gongs, are within easy reach of the cashier and customers who can play them. At certain moments T., the instruments (horn, flute, saxophone, percussion) invite themselves onto the stage for a musical moment of another temporality.
You're back in your composer's hat!
These are indeed scores that I wrote, but well in advance of the show. They're all in response to commissions that I fulfilled knowing that I was going to integrate them into my project. I call it compilation music, since it's already existing pieces that are brought together here. I really wanted to involve the Neue Vocalsolisten from Stuttgart, those stars of contemporary singing who were difficult to get to come to the set. So I went to film and record them at their place of work. They appear in video at the end of the show on the sides of the little boxes; they're the ghosts of the gas station! They wear VR headsets, whose usual function we've hijacked, enabling them to read the score in real time; and they perform a few songs of my own with their usual verve.
With its Wagnerian scope, this four-hour format seems to be punctuated by refrains - the cashier's gentle hum, for example - which give a sense of continuity and coherence to what is, all in all, a very heterogeneous narrative. How did you come up with the overall shape of this show?
It was while reading Alexandre Labruffe's Chroniques d'une station-service , a novel with a series of very short chapters, the content of which provides material for development in the body of the story, that I came up with the idea of cutting the scenes into four and distributing their segments in alternation with others, giving the flow of the story a certain tonicity while maintaining continuity in discontinuity.
You say that all your shows are participatory?
Indeed, spectators who so wish can intervene at certain moments and take part in the action via an app they can download onto their smartphone. They are called in turn by the cashier (by text message), one to go and buy cigarettes, the other to have a coffee or play a part on the cymbal; the texts to be said and the gestures to be performed scroll across their phone's screen. In this way, the audience is also in action, part of the artistic performance (my idea was to pay them for this), with constant movement around the room blurring the spaces between stage and audience, actors and listeners.
You also include moments of pure theater...
... for the theatre-going public who come to our shows, and to include a genuine humorous scene that I've also split into two episodes: this is a video-conference involving four lambda participants behind screens and an expert (actor) whose speech (also sonorous) adopts the tics of the German language(hm? ja genau, etc.). On the model of the Amazon unions that have recently formed, I imagined a meeting where we'd be talking about founding service station unions to learn how to say no!
Why did you choose the word "corals", referring to marine fauna, to go with "service station"?
Despite environmental pressures, I've always felt a certain unease about the human race's constant drive for more (especially when you read about the upward curves of development and growth for our activities). However, it would seem that this colonization is specific to each species, like that of corals (on a different scale, of course). So coral colonies are, in the eyes of the diver in me, the most interesting places in the sea because they are home to so many other species. The same irony is attached to the gas station in the middle of the desert (it's a welcoming and lively place) and to the oil (symbol of the gas station) enabling our colonies to develop. Without oil, we couldn't build our coral cities. I think I do these music-theater pieces to cure myself of my stiffness of mind. In spite of myself, I'm trapped by my sadness at the sad news of mainstream ecology. Doing this research allows me to complexify my thoughts, avoiding the usual emotional highways linked to headlines, virtuality and its entertainment.
Interview by Michèle Tosi
Photos © Arthur Miserez
Photos © Lea Huser
