Laurent Grappe "Le Luxe De La Reflexion!"

After several stays in Lebanon, and having experienced the country’s permanent tension, we wanted to address the complexity of representation that communities develop towards their own language when facing domination from an outside culture.
This work is a “sound being” and the result of my meeting with Isabelle Bassil. “We have forgotten something, but to learn what has been forgotten, we need to access the suffering from those who haven’t yet accessed to oblivion,” says Philippe Vaernewyck in the last interlude of the work, and a fragment taken from one of our numerous discussions on the luxury of reflection. Through Isabelle’s life, a Lebanese girl using Arabic speaking with all the distance of a foreigner’s experience, we can recall the idea of a poetic phonography of intimacy with texts and culture. Behind each of Isabelle’s choices (Khalil Gibran, Najib Mahafouz, or a popular tale like “the heart of a mother” for instance), lies a portrait, a souvenir, an emotion, a claiming, an Arabic memory in any case. For each piece, we carefully positioned the microphones to create the situation that would allow the necessary gap to the reception of this expression. From a musical standpoint, we tried and built a sound dramaturgy to bring the listening on the course where the voice creates the movement. We hope to trigger off imagination, opening to a poetic interpretation of sense by overtly playing on the recognition of the sound sources that evoke both journeys and (y)our native language. Our music includes electro-acoustics and concrete aesthetics. We let sounds exist by themselves. The sounds and sequences were often played using our memory of our first stays there, adding an idealized perfume to it. Le luxe de la réflexion! (The luxury of reflection!) is an attempt in valuing the Arabic language, presented as an oral and written language, and beyond this, represent when languages are experienced as stigmata. We tell of people whom ghettoized native language involves insecurity.
This piece was first conceived as a work for a tape and one actor, and was first shown on January 6 1996 at L’Embarcadère in Lyon, as part of the collective event “comme un murmure” (”as a whisper”). It was then decided to use it as a training material (Inter Service Migrant) around this concept so “Le luxe…” has been shown around 20 times in France. The acousmatic version has been created using high-end sound techniques to ease focus on the qualities of listening, and played in Le Festival d’Albi, Les 38èmes Rugissants, Futura, Le Festival. Inter. Musi. Impro. Libre in Beirut, Le 102, Les Instants Chavirés, Le Vandémiaire, Le nomade’s land, Le Cirque clandestin des frères Kasamarof.

Credits: Composed By - Laurent Grappe
Other [Arabic Calligraphy] - Hassan Massoudy
Vocals - Nazem El Khazali
Voice - Ani Hovsepian , Ibrahim Accaoui , Philippe Vaernewyck
Voice, Other [Translation] - Isabelle Bassil
Notes: Realised in the studio of La Muse en Circuit. Thanks to GRAME.

thanx microtonne
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