Trauerspiel

Co-creation — Installation — Performance — sound experiment — 2019

In collaboration with Joël Defrance,

opera #low-fi #solastalgia #camp #tranimal #mourners

Sound installation / Speakers in blocks of ice broadcasting Toxic by Britney Spears in slow motion, lamento turned drone / Creatures half-diva, half-monkey, in fake fur and diving suit / winch & stiletto heels / Tenor and counter-tenor lyrical interpretation of Britney / Pseudo-Wagnerian vision / Mourners.

Joël and Gaëtan share their fantasized images of the tragic endings of the great female soloist figures of the Opera, mortals such as the transfigured Isolde, the fall of Tosca, the dance of Electra, the dissolution of Emilia Marty… These divas who, every performance, never stops falling, dancing and dying.

They are developing a low-fi operatic piece called Trauerspiel*. They explore the emotions that arise from Solastalgia, a new contemporary spleen or sehnsucht, linked to the current climate crisis. They start from the conviction that these noble emotions are widely shared by living things.

They play with the codes of opera and performance, without really mastering those of the first, a highly technical, energy-consuming and sometimes even grotesque discipline. They divert it towards a performative and plastic object. They play two half-diva, half-monkey creatures performing Toxic by Britney Spears in slow motion.

Trauerspiel is also a reflection on the difference between the human and animal condition, in the context of the sixth mass extinction and the global warming crisis.

*Trauerspiel: « The play of mourning or sadness that defines Trauerspiel is a conjuring of sadness itself. In the Trauerspiel, sadness wards off itself, but it is also to save itself. » (source unknown)

Duration: 45 minutes

CREDITS

concept & performance: Joel De France & Gaëtan Rusquet Makeup: Rebecca Flores
This project was commissioned as part of the Opéra Monde exhibition at the Center Pompidou Metz and presented for the first time in the nave of the Center Pompidou Metz in front of the scenography by Małgorzata Szczęśniak, invitation by Julien Ribeiro, curated by Stéphane Ghislain Roussel.

SHOWS

1.12.2019 Opéra-Monde Exhibition, Center Pompidou-Metz, Metz (FR)