Listen to the brass night
A projet by Massimo Furlan, Numero23Prod.
Created on 22 août 2015 for Far, Festival de Nyon.
With the brass from Mont-sur-Rolle, direction: Albin de Miéville
Light : Daniel Demon
Massimo Furlan focuses on creating images. After working for several years in drawing and painting workshops, he chose the stage to create three-dimensional images with all the tricks and gimmicks of theatre: light, sound, and movement. His projects are almost always devoid of spoken text. His work is neither theatre nor dance, but an area of research and experimentation – a performance area that enables him to build what he himself calls ‘long images’: living tableaux so to speak, images that breathe, that one can look into to observe their composition, balance and colour, and at times, their strangeness and incongruity. The audience create their own story, relating it to what they have just seen or to other images they saw before, elsewhere, in a museum or a cinema, for example. It is their choice to play with the senses, to let themselves drift into a sort of daydream. There is no unique perspective. There are no instructions to follow. Massimo Furlan’s theatre belongs in the field of contemporary art. His work oscillates between an absence of signs and meanings and an excess of them. Mutual projection of subjectivity is played out between performer and audience, between artist and receiver.
Interview with Claire de Ribaupierre
In 2005, at the far° festival, you presented a piece that was performed on the train from Nyon to Saint-Cergue, at night. Could you tell us about that project?
Yes, for me, far° festival relates to Girls Change Places. I decided to take the audience on a train journey, on the Nyon-St. Cergue line. It was an extraordinary project, which took place at night, and which sticks to the memory particularly of all who experienced it. We hadn’t rehearsed. We’d only selected the stations where we wanted the train to stop. We’d visited them to solve any technical problems that might arise and to create the scenes, and then we set it all up in one go, a sort of full dress rehearsal. It was really light-hearted and yet ambitious and over-the-top. I still remember the long tracking shot of the Cadillac convertible with the girls sitting in the back, following the train for several kilometres. Then the appearance in the middle of nowhere of the Pièta, Diane Decker as the Virgin Mary who held in her lap Philippe de Rham – our sound engineer – playing the dead body of Christ: it felt like we were entering a tableau. And just before we arrived in Saint-Cergue, all the way up the mountain at night, a young woman in a little white dress riding a horse was caught in the headlights of the Cadillac… Finally, of course, on the second night, the train broke down for two hours in the countryside: that performance didn’t end until dawn. It was magical…
What does the idea of commemoration bring to mind for you? (com-memorate: remembering together, recalling a memory).
Commemorating means celebrating a memory, recalling and reliving it, and putting on a party that is light-hearted and unpretentious rather than pompous.
Knowing that the festival will celebrate its 30th anniversary this year, I wondered what I myself could commemorate in relation to the festival. The train is still a wonderful project in my eyes, seemingly impossible, and I feel a desire to return to those tracks. In a way, for me, far° festival reminds me first and foremost of the Nyon-St. Cergue train.
I would like to travel back to that landscape, to reveal the night landscape to an audience once again, without interfering, or hardly so – with just a soundtrack, for example. I would like to show what can be seen every day, as well as what cannot be seen.
For this future project, you chose to invite a brass band. Several of your shows feature brass bands. Could you tell us about your relationship with this type of music?
Yes, that’s true. I like the simple, popular music of brass bands. They remind me of Fellini’s films. Brass bands and brass instruments were present in my first stage performance, Gran Canyon Solitude: in one of the tableaux, all the performers had trumpets, tubas, sousaphones, etc. and had to blow into them although they didn’t know how to play them. The scene lasted ten minutes or so. In Les Héros de la pensée, the same principle again: each philosopher was given an instrument and had to produce a sound, playing together with other performers for five minutes at the end of every hour. The performance lasted a total of 26 hours. Real brass bands actually played national anthems for three of my football-related performances, at the beginning of games in Vienna, Hamburg and Halle. And for our recent Gym Club – a show created in Graz, Austria, which focuses on Arnold Schwarzenegger and bodybuilding – the soundtrack was almost entirely based on the brass music of The Bersaglieri.
This new far° project is a collaboration. Is it important for you to collaborate with people? What does it involve?
Yes, quite simply, one of the key issues in this performance is meeting and working with brass bands, with people who play music for the pleasure of being together – local music most of the time – and trying to go as far as possible with them. I like working with people who aren’t related to the performing arts’ world. I’ve done this several times already, i.e. in Paris with the Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, where I created two performances with children and elderly people, in It’s all forgotten, which focused on the ballroom scene in Kubrick’s Shining, in Madre, which featured students from the campus, and finally in Schiller Thriller which featured a group of 20 amateurs, in Germany and then in Switzerland (Lausanne and Geneva).
I also like working with other institutions that aren’t related to theatre and contemporary art, such as the staff at Geneva Airport, football teams and administrative officials. I loved it in 2005, when I worked with the train drivers on the Nyon-St. Cergue line. I like exploring new worlds and taking people on what appear to be impossible journeys.
What do you hope audiences will feel from this performance?
I don’t want to do anything spectacular. I would rather let the landscape appear and breathe for itself. I would like for the audience to slowly enter into this ‘long image’; to simply listen to the music coming from the dark night, breaking the silence and painting the darkness with colour; to see details, shapes and objects appear; to immerse themselves for the duration of the journey to the sound of the moving train; to see the world framed in the train’s windows…
Festival Far teaser, with an extract of the performance …