Encyclopédie de la parole Joris Lacoste / Pierre-Yves Macé / Sébastien Roux / Ictus – Suite nº4

[Theater / Music]

For the final show in the series of choral suites, the Encyclopédie de la parole has chosen to make heard in a direct manner the stuff of its sound collection, used in the writing of the shows: recordings of the spoken word.

In Suite n°4, it is no longer actors who lend their bodies to disappeared voices, but the characters themselves who come back from the past in order to speak to us with their own voices, with their unique melody, inimitable tone, and way of breathing. Using a sound design by Sébastien Roux, words enter and leave the stage, bringing with them spaces, images, situations, sections of tension or emotion, and events ranging from the major to the microscopic. Just as in opera, the voices are sustained, carried along, and transported by the instrumental music: interpreted by seven members of the Ictus ensemble, Pierre-Yves Macé’s score shifts our listening focus from place to place and teases up hidden accents. By mixing acoustic and electric together, and by summoning up tonal associations of a unique nature, it heightens perception. The result is thus a sort of theatre of phantoms, but with ghosts that are very much alive and which speak, whisper, shout, apostrophise, laugh, count, recount, explain, preach and console, rant and encourage, desire and regret, dance, suffer, rejoice, live and have no desire whatsoever to die. By honing in on the infinite, infinitesimal modulations of the human spoken word, Suite n°4 is a celebration of all that is very much alive and fleeting. As such, it is a way of sounding, one last time, “the inflection of voices once dear to us but which have fallen into silence”.