Encyclopédie de la parole Frédéric Danos – L’encyclopédiste

L’encyclopédiste is the one-person show of a fervent collector and practitioner of the spoken word. Rather than indulging in formalist demonstrations, this encyclopaedist comes to the conclusion, through play and general zig-zagging, that the politics of the spoken word is about none other than the person opposite us.

Alternating between broadcast and reproduction, the encyclopaedist journeys through an abundant collection of recorded words, commenting on the phenomena constituted by their formal architectures. Between what is contained in the recordings when we listen to them and what is unravelled in his self-taught comments and analyses on their contents, a mixture of the political, the unsaid, the humorous and the poetic come together and provide the structure for the pitch of this individual’s highly unusual passion. He exults in the delights of repetition, the propping-up effect of spacing, and the hidden treasures continued in the residue. He talks to us of learning and loss, resurgence, taste, the noise-melody of chatter, Ariane’s thread and the many convolutions of a question which is a bit too long to formulate, games to share in, the assistance and support afforded by a discussion between friends, the wondrous snake and backwash hidden in a teacher’s temperate prosody, the unrelenting construction of a conversation through the modulation of the same lone syllable, and the manner in which a dialogue with a coyote takes on the allures of a crowned passerine. In this game of figurations, disfigurations, and reconfiguration, L’encyclopédiste invites us to think again about our habits as users of words.