Marie Cambois and Lê Quan Ninh long wanted to start artistic collaboration and it was clear that it would be around their common discipline that improvisation is. However, it was around a recent musical score that this first project was built as it seemed to one that it would be an ideal environment for the other. This is Two Stones American composer Michael Pisaro, born in 1961 and a member of the Wandelweiser collective.
The work of Michael Pisaro dilutes the boundary between musical composition and sound art: although responding to well-defined formal elements that the listener perceives and understands immediately, the result is environmental where each sound seems to be located in the space created by other sounds such as an object that one could easily observe and around which one could easily evolve.
To support this aspect of a visual sound art, Marie Cambois and Lê Quan Ninh invited visual artist Christophe Cardoën for his sensitivity to music and improvisation as well as his singularity in light, as well as Mathieu Chamagne, musician and developer who broadcast live on eight speakers the electronic sounds indicated and suggested in the score and who designed a software allowing a random drawing of the order of the 15 parts that make it so that it is renewed at each performance, giving both performers the possibility of a new and unfrozen reading.
In opening the performance, Lê Quan Ninh improvises about ten minutes with a set of stones laid on the ground, making them sound as if they were only swept away by a slight breeze. A duet improvisation with Mathieu Chamagne.
Two Stones is a minimalist performance – due to the precise and devious nature of the elements involved – but creating a land-based and climate-based environment through their layout, superposition and coexistence. Some would talk about a phenomenology of look, listening and tactile sensation.
Play Two Stones
Playing Two Stones music is not playing music. Rather, it is a matter of experiencing the sound simplicity of which space is as enlightened by sound, its movements, its presence and its actions. As in minimalist art, the very little makes appear not the object to be looked at but its surroundings. Similarly, there is no question of making anything heard, but of suggesting. Any intention is abandoned except that of the attention which underpins the presence. At the heart of the sound phenomenon, a subtle concentration can become a dream and come back to the simple astonishment of seeing what moves and what remains, what persists and what disappears.
Sheet music: Michael Pisaro • Dance: Marie Cambois • Music: Lê Quan Ninh • Light: Christophe Cardoen • Dissemination and programming: Mathieu Chamagne
Production : The Collective Distillery • Coproduction : CCAM – National Scene of Vandœuvre, Ryoanji Association
Two Stones is assisted by the Greater East Region and the City of Nancy Project • The collective distillery benefits from the dance structuring aid of the DRAC Grand Est 2021-22 • Ryoanji has been contracted by DRAC and the New Aquitaine Region since 2012
TWO STONES // The collective distillery // Teaser From marie cambois on Vimeo.