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Rhythms ’n’ views
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With a fistful of art supplies, a trunk full of instruments and no safety net to speak of, France’s Jean-Baptiste Miller and Romain Bermond—respectively the primary musician and artist in the A/V duo Stéréoptik—routinely share their elaborate yarn about a jazz singer abducted by aliens, while two shadowy figures concurrently explore the wide world, in a surprisingly lo-fi yet marvellously multifaceted manner. Though the musical dimension of Stéréoptik is grounded in jazz-funk, flavoured by a wide array of outside elements, improvisation isn’t the highest priority. “Each part of the show is very much prepared,” says Bermond, “like a number in a circus or a scene in a film. At the same time, despite the limitations of the highly defined structure, the visual and sonic creations are never the same from one show to the next.” The show’s projected visuals, in no small part generated on the fly, span a variety of media, often considered afresh. Bermond’s pencil drawings, for instance, double as percussion thanks to a contact mic on his table. “I had to learn to draw while also creating a rhythm, and then bring that into the musical dialogue between us. And of course, the drawings have to turn out successfully! This part demands a great deal of work, training and listening. The real challenge, once the technical hurdles have been overcome, is to do something interesting with it. That judgment is up to the audience.” Other visual elements include a 40-metre fresco that unfurls on a roller, sand art (“a beautiful technique, very sensitive and poetic”), paper cut-outs (“That reminds us of the shows we watched on TV as kids”) and marker drawings seen from the other side of the sheet—“Those are a wink at the film by Clouzot and Picasso, Le mystère Picasso, in which the artist’s hand is invisible. The drawings appear before our eyes as if by magic. “As the story moves forward and the visual techniques become more diverse, the music becomes more and more dense and complex, to the point that all the instruments on stage are being played at the same time—and by just one person! We don’t use computers, samplers or graphics tablets on stage. We just have our pencils, our instruments and our visual and musical influences.” AT USINE C ON SATURDAY, JAN. 30 |
