Spatial improvisation

Why improvisation ? : Improvising with chaos of life

The spatial performance tool Live 4 Life is intended to represent in a way Life (and its chaos, in which we strive to struggle and build something). Unlike Oscar Wilde, where, according to him, life imitates art, my tool and creations are based on the opposite relationship, where art imitates (chaos of) life.

Each improvisation with a different spatial setup is different and cannot be reproduced (partly due to channel-based spatialisations).

As James Yorke also says in its chaos theory, we must be ready to change our plans at any time: “In life, it is important to be flexible. I don't plan things anymore. I prefer to discover them.“

Fixed compositions do not interest me no longer, since they do not integrate or represent the risk and ephemeral character of Life...

As Claude Como, a visual artist who creates vertical tapestries on large walls using the tufting technique with wool, says : “I compose like a painter, except that I've freed myself and stepped out of the frame so that the form becomes free. As a result, it can proliferate without frame or limit. In other words, these forms will join together and the work can be endless and constantly work-in-progress, constantly developing. It's modified all the time and unlimited in time.“ In a similar way, I've moved away from the static acousmatic sound form, out of the fixed space-time framework, freezing the form homogeneously regardless of space, and towards freer forms of electronic improvisation, which I prefer both in their creative work and in their presentation form for their more instantaneous character that can generate surprises, not only on the perceptual side, but also in the events created. So I'm no longer interested in the fixed form, because it no longer surprises me, or surprises me less. As Claude Como puts it : “I try to be astonished myself at what it can produce. There's something about discovery and exploration that plunges me and awakens my childhood and the child in me, because there's a fascination, an astonishment, a surprise. I need that surprise.“

Improvisation is also a way of creating and destroying creation, as time goes by, just like in life, if it is not recorded (which is a process I generally not do or focus on). Few artists have destroyed or erased their own creations. The Spanish plastic artist Joan Miró did it with his burnt canvases or tapestries. Similarly, at the College of Architects of Catalonia, just below the Picasso frieze, Joan Miró played the street artist, painting on the entire glazed surface of the building, and three days later, he proceeded to the public destruction of his work.

Similar to the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, I also allow myself to multiply sketches and rework creations made a long time ago. In opposition to the majority of compositions of the acousmatic world, I accept the unfinished form. I no longer feel obliged to finish a creation definitively and no longer wish to do so, as life is an unfinished form. I can thus leave fragments as they are, quite simply because there is something fragmented, broken in my perception, like Friedrich Hölderlin.

Due to my loneliness, I symbolically ally myself with other composers (like Bernard Parmegiani and Francis Dhomont), by re-exploiting and recycling their own compositions and sound materials, like a spatial DJ of modified electroacoustic samples. However, I do not belong to the electroacoustic community, who "sanctify" fixed, finished compositions above everything, and I am not really considered by this community, since my co-creations / re-interpretations / improvisations are not considered as new interesting propositions by the acousmatic community, partly since they come from old, past compositions by other composers. I prefer working and learning from traditions or from the past, although it is not new or particularly personal for others.

As any novel can be a biography of its author, like the Charterhouse of Parma for / by Stendahl, by taking up Bernard Parmegiani and Francis Dhomont, I show the secrets, feelings and perceptions of my soul and my life. As the painter Basil Hallward says, any portrait painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter or model.

---

Why real time performance ?

To be more true and fight with Reality

The performer Steven Cohen says : “You know how I really feel when I’m performing is like I am not in myself. Andy Warhol said it well : “When real life happens to you, you feel like you’re watching TV.“ Like you break your arm, and you’re watching yourself break your arm. I often, when I’m performing, feel like I am outside myself watching myself perform. And apparently, that’s a kind of exalted state. […] I don’t know when I’m most me or when I’m pretending to be me. I think a lot of people have issues with that but don’t confront it. And performance art is almost an opportunity to question : how much of you is you and how much of you is pretending to be you ? […] I’m always fighting for reality in an artificial space. And it’s always a compromise between what is possible, what is practical, what is ideal. And I think also the power of work gets lost in the practice of what can be allowed. I hate theatre in short.“ I could have said the same about my practice and sensation of spatial performance in opposition to acoustic music that I may like, although I dislike its formatted presentation form.

To focus on the ephemeral and fragile real Instant

As I have a natural tendency to focus too much on the heavy past or the slipping future, I have chosen real time to better learn and apprehend the life of the moment and a certain happiness. I pursue the same desire and thought as the sculptor Luben Boykov when he says : “Over the years, I'm moving from durability to temporality to vulnerability, to objects that do not last. I am really moving away from this traditional desire in all of us to transcend mortality. This substitution of flesh and bone with grasses, grape bunches, cactus, fibre is a function of my conviction there are no physical boundaries between any form of life. If one day, I can just make sculpture out of air and manipulate air to the point whereby it can convey, at least for a brief period of time, a certain thought, idea, emotion, feeling... This is the direction I'm going towards. The more fragile, the better.“

As Nietzsche says in Genealogy of Morals : “The man who is unable to sit on the threshold of the moment, forgetting all the events of the past, the man who cannot without vertigo and without fear stand up for a moment as if in victory, will never know what happiness is, and what is worse, he will never do anything to give happiness to others.“

As Erri de Luca says in his book Value, “I attach value to what tomorrow will be worth nothing and to what today is still worth little...“

To be in contact with the present and fragile real Body

“Me, it's my body that thinks. It's smarter than my brain. It feels more finely, more completely than my brain. All my skin has a soul.“ Colette

---

Other quotations :

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.“ Nietzsche

“People have often defended art on the grounds that life is chaos, and therefore we need art as an escape from life. I would like to have an art so confusing, complex and illogical that we return to life with great pleasure.“ John Cage

“How to make a movement alive, with or without technique ? How to preserve in the gesture, even though it has been studied and repeated for a long time, the same spontaneity as that of a cat ? For me it's a question of faith and a permanent belief in the surprise of the instant.“ Merce Cunnigham

Personal question by analogy with Merce Cunnigham : How to make an instant of life / art really alive ?