Encyclopédie de la parole blablabla

Emmanuelle Lafon

[Theatre]

With Blablabla, Joris Lacoste and Emmanuelle Lafon will be orchestrating, for the first time, a children’s version of their Encyclopédie de la parole. In this piece, devised using recordings of all different kinds, an actress-singer-performer will be exploring how children hear. Thus, the question is not what is their point of view, but what is their “point of hearing” ? This show is destined for adult and child listeners alike.
There are no characters, no story, with a beginning, middle and end. Just words. A hundred or so of them, taken from a wide variety of sources which, when pieced together and spoken by a single voice, conjure up in the minds of spectators, young and old alike, a drama all of its own.Directed by Emmanuelle Lafon and composed by Joris Lacoste, Blablabla draws upon the slightest oral inflections of each word. It might be Mrs McGonagall greeting Hogwarts’ young witches and wizards, Jean-Pierre Pernaut presenting the day’s events on TF1, a break-time game of cops and robbers, the conductor welcoming us aboard the TGV n°1456 train, a speaking toy, a rapper rapping, the queen of hearts wanting to make some heads roll or Radouane’s fits of laughter... What do we hear, in terms of their meaning, when these words are taken out of their context and turned into sound matter? And how do children perceive what they hear at school, at home, in the street, or on the television? Via a special sound device, designed by Ircam for the occasion, the actress-singer-performer Armelle Dousset experiments with her voice and summons up an array of different characters. For the last ten years, the Encyclopédie de la parole has been exploring what is real through the medium of human language. This is the first time the collective has devised a family show, suitable for audiences aged 6 years old upwards.