fr / eng

home biography projects practices texts dates links contact ©

chorality | perceptive psycho-pedagogy | Sweet & Tender collaborations

Chorality(ies)1

Choral singing was my very first substantial and persistent practice. It has a ccompanied me since I was a kid. I think I can say it has been a place of stability, a cornerstone, a groundswell.

My becoming a choir conductor was following on from this, like a pre-movement to my entering the choreographic field, and enabled me to seize how much this role is important, even if not necessary. It is often ascribed a certain power, even an abuse of power : I remember attending a lecture by Bojana Cvejić in Mexico in 2009, where she would assume the conductor (of an orchestra) as an authoritarian, or even an authoritarianistic figure, since, for example, they would impose their own breath to the music they "invite" their musicians to play. The conductor would then necessarily be a dictatorial figure in the sense that they provide a peculiar mode, time, imaginary for the performance of a music. Without denying the totalitarian excesses, always possible, of the ones who are "in charge" or "in control", why essentialize the figure of the conductor ? This figure seems to me first and foremost to be carrying the driving gesture of a certain organisation, of a certain assembly which is contingent to the space and time in whichthe music is performed. The conductor gives a peculiar interpretation of the music they are conducting. They are, as much as the musicians in the orchestra, not a demiurg, but an interpreter, a performer of this music which they are conducting. They are in charge of giving an orientation to the group, to give it a direction, in the most spatial sense of the term. Describing them as a dictator is too easily mixing up : on one hand, the power of uniting, of gathering and of assembling forces that the conductor puts in the service of the making of a common project ; and on the other hand, the power as an abuse of power and as the imposition of an order that only the conductor could decide on. All the more so as I feel I need to underline that, very often, the musicians, the singers are very aware that they rely on the interpretation that their conductor has of the music they are performing with them.

The conductor doesn't appear to me as the one who knows, the one whom we rely on because of the knowledge that they have about the score and that we don't have, the one therefore that you would need to emancipate from inasmuch as they represent a paternalistic figure which transmits their knowledge without questioning their own poesture in this transmission. They seem, to me, to be first of all, someone who has an intuition, a peculiar way of feeling a music work. They are thus the one whom we choose to trust and in favor of whom we choose to put our own skills in service of their sensible and sensitive proposition of performance of this music work. Reducing the conductor to a figure which would necessarily abuse their "power", of their "authority" is, to me, having a distorted perception of the relations that connect some conductors with their musicians.

Besides this issue of the conductor's "power", the most striking in my experience as a conductor has been the kinesthetic sensations that it brought me. As I described it in the note of intention for chambre son, a student project I made when being at CNDC in Angers, choir conducting has often given me the sensation of a sonorous mass, of a vocal body generated by the gathering of all the singers' voices. There is kind of weight in this vocal body which is taken in charge by the tonicity of the singers' vocal gesture and engagement, but also by my own body in its engagement to carry and shape this vocal body. Through this shared tonicity emerges the conjunction of the voices, not their homogenisation, but rather their convergence. This vocal body is then less a separated and apart being than the result of multiple relations which interlace and design thrusts which will define its texture and architecture. It is in itself the activation of this relation in between the voices, in between the gestures of each one (singers and conductor). It is this in-between space, which enables to bind the voices with one another without ever des-indivudalising them : each voice is in service of the common sound, but the commin sound itself is in service of the appearance of each voice. This conjunction looks like the connection that make the connective tissues in the body : fascias separate, isolate the structures of the body, but they also link them. Gradually, from one structure to another, the wide web of fascia (see my page on perceptive psychopedagogy) which envelops all organs, muscles, bones..., binds all these structures together. The vocal body which emerges in this conjunction and convergence of voices seems to me to take aspects similar to fascias.
This common vocal body is the object of the developments of "Choral singing, chorality and ethics".

This kinesthetic reason is namely why the link between the choreographic and the vocal fields has been at stake in many of my artistic projects. The explorations during chambre son (2006), breathing choir (2008), Singing with Nicaoax (2010), I’ve got you under my skin (2012), Plurissons (2018), but also — for the part I was involved in — during Five People (2010), all somehow challenged these relations in whichn the choir engages to create a common sonorous mass.

These relations sometimes aim at revealing the individual and group negociation strategies of the sound being produced on the spot, with the aim of reaching a conc(h)ord / disc(h)ord (Five People and Plurissons). They also try to highlight the way each singer, following their own pace, reorganises live this vocal mass by making individual decisions related to what is being produced at the very same moment by the group, each voice appearing and disappearing from this common vocal mass (chambre son, Singing with Nicaoax, Plurissons). They can also underline the soundscape aspect that singing in a choir can carry, in a maybe more "classic" understanding of this practice, but also the way a group — without the intervention of a conductor — moves along a choreographic and vocal preset score, which contains margins of choice, of positioning from the singers (chambre son, breathing choir, Singing with Nicaoax, I’ve got you under my skin).

1 With "chorality" I’m trying to render the French word "choralité", which is used to speak about all kinds of works which involve different voices speaking, singing, playing at the same time.

February 2018