Can you talk a bit about your own background, as a director of stage productions and opera?
I began life as an actor, at the Ecole supérieure d’acteurs in Liège. But very quickly I turned to direction of theatre productions. I started writing from documentary materials – like anthropology. In other words, conducting interviews and collecting other materials, and from that you create a story. I was also exploring a lot of new technologies – 20 years ago it was video, but now it’s evolving towards many more transdisciplinary formats.
Documentary has been the basis of my work, followed by work with non-professional actors: to really put life on stage. I also soon began to work with music, working at LOD Muziektheater – I worked with Daan Janssens on Menuet, and recently we worked together again, with Flanders Opera House, on Brodeck, the first opera for which I’ve written the libretto.
And then, for the first time, with Leonardo García-Alarcón, I was able to direct a classical opera, a historical work: Luigi Rossi’s Il palazzo incantato (The Enchanted Palace). We had to “write over” the writing, so to speak – it is one of the very first operas. I think Leonardo really liked the way I had a contemporary view on the material, as it gives little away to an audience today – it is extremely Baroque. In the earliest operas the first scene was always the prologue to the Muses, announcing what was about to happen. In the production, we worked a lot with cameras and video – we can tell a lot of story behind what is happening on stage.
What kind of show is Seasons? How does it combine various artforms onstage?
After Il palazzo incantato, Leonardo and I developed Seasons as a kind of movie-concert. We wanted to create portraits of life in the city of Geneva, with three screens on stage: three portraits of imaginary residents of La Cité Universitaire, the complex that houses La Cité Bleue.
There’s a very sensitive relationship between the music and what’s happening in the images, with the music underscoring the films, but also an interaction between them. It is almost like a dance – very choreographic, with all the visual elements.
Can you talk a bit about the scenario of the show? Who are the characters and what situation do they find themselves in?
The three screens are not directly linked to three characters, but they move between them. When you see this building, you see so many individuals next to each other, alone in each of their units – very close, one to each other, very connected, but at the same time very alone.
The idea was to present portraits of three characters: first is Mariana, a woman, alone moving into a new empty flat, at the end of a toxic relationship. She also is facing lot of neurological troubles: each character is losing one sense. (If they were able to meet, they could maybe complete each other, but it never happens in the story.)
The second character is Arezki, a young man in the process of getting out of prison. He has an electronic tag on his leg, and is trying to reintegrate, though facing a new kind of prison in the outside world – and he is losing his hearing.
The third character, TK, is losing his sight. He is living in his flat in an almost-entirely virtual world, with a VR-headset. He’s always between taking refuge, in a virtual world, but also having to go outside.
These three characters are each living something very different, but are also in the process of loss, of losing one of their senses – and their stories are crossing. For instance, Arezki is an Uber Eats delivery rider, and he’s delivering pizza to TK…
La Cité Bleue is a very new venue – only opening in winter 2023. Has there been an emphasis on developing a distinct approch tailored to the venue?
The project was to work specifically at La Cité Bleue – and it’s a very special space, located within Cité Universitaire de Genève. People from all over the world come here to study. I come from Brussels, so this internationalism is not something foreign to me. There are a lot of languages spoken, a lot of different cultures. And then there is the physical shape of the building, how it is oriented and organised, with cultures meeting one another in surprising ways. The show isn’t intended to say something very theoretical about all this, but rather to create portraits of people, and by extension a portrait of a whole building and a whole city.
The musical sources used in the show are extremely varied – from Barbara Strozzi and Henry Purcell, to Piazzolla and Argentinian tango, to Billy Joel and the Black Eyed Peas. How did you approach such a wide musical corpus?
First we cast the performers: we wanted to have a trio of singers. We really wanted to work again with Mariana Flores, she comes from the world of opera, but she also has access to South American music, Tango and so on. We wanted then to find two other performers: Arezki has a background in north African, Kabyle culture, as well as hip-hop. And then, we found TK Russell, originally from Congo – his vocal performance encompasses soul, funk and so on, and he is a dancer as well.
We wanted to explore the repertories of these three performers, and I wanted to make these portraits based on these performers, the characters are based on their own personal universes, and their musical universes. They are the centre.
Sometimes, the universes mix and overlap. Imagine I could be at home in my flat, taking my breakfast, while downstairs there is another story happening, perhaps a fight between two persons – while the music I’m listening to is the soundtrack of the situation downstairs. That’s the game: to cross between different situations with the same musical soundtrack.
Can you talk a bit about the filmed aspects of the show? How does the filmed material interweave with onstage action?
With this show, we first decided on the soundtrack – really a playlist. From that, I took the energy of these successive compositions, and wrote three stories. Imagining persons who don’t know each other, but who are listening to the same playlist. I started to work with this musical score and to combine it with images.
Like an opera, the music was the starting point for how we then developed the storyboards. We would insert silent sections, where the music would stop and the film would continue on its own. At other times, the film stops, and we are left alone with a single character on stage – it’s fascinating when a character who is appearing on screen, in very cinematic imagery, is suddenly on stage in front of us. It can give us something that is impossible for cinema: to have people facing people. The last place in the world we have that is theatre – people directly in front of other people.
Then it becomes like a game of situations, like Lego. I had the scenario, important things I needed to shoot (what I’m doing now), but I know that all my plans will change when I hear the arrangement of the music and begin work in editing. It’s like a game: you have to know the cards in your hand. If you know your cards, you know what you can change. If you always do what you had planned, it won’t work – but you have to know with what you are playing.
How do you see music and music theatre relating to our lives as we live them today?
We are living in a society – in our occidental society – of disenchantment, of desacralisation. Art and music can do something to fulfil our cathartic needs. Seasons is about that – how these characters need to find a shelter, to retreat from this world. They don’t have possibilities, because of all their responsibilities, because of where they live, because of all the social pressure they have on their shoulders. It seems quite simple in a way, but music is a door, way out for so many people. Given everything that all these streaming services offer, it’s amazing what we have in our pockets. And creating music is just another level of that.
It’s like making the soundtrack to your life: when you put music in a certain situation, you don’t know if you’re living your life, or living the movie of your life. But I hope this show will allow the audience to enter into an aloneness, parallel to the ways that these three individual human beings live.
Seasons runs at La Cité Bleue.
This article was sponsored by La Cité Bleue.
