Micro

When he met three of the musicians from the rock group Moon Pallas, Pierre Rigal could finally realise a fantasy that had haunted him for a long time: creating and choreographing a concert, a sort of microscopic opera. In others words, giving rock music visible, almost palpable shape by destructuring it. Showing music as movement consists in metamorphosing how musicians usually play in performances. Playing the drums while the instrument scatters and goes farther and farther away from the drummer; discovering a guitar and its sounds as though it were the first day; being forced to play an instrument that isn't the musician's or in a strictly non-academic position, head down, legs up; being confronted with instruments and objects - keyboards, speakers, amplifiers, distortion pedals, cables - that constantly change places... All these obstacles and challenges impose a deep and revelatory upheaval on the traditional and unshakable ritual of the rock concert. The musicians invent new ways of moving, other gestures; they offer themselves a new body and abandon themselves to unusual rhythms. The concert stage then becomes a dance stage. There, the rockers appear to us differently, going from one musical register to another, multiplying personalities: they are born for the stage, huge stars, of course, but also men who have gone back to the origins of sound, warriors attempting to tame the violence of their machines, as if they had become the instruments of their instruments. Going through this concert from one end to the other, breathing his tempo into it, Pierre Rigal gives tangible shape to the movement of the music, which is also that of electricity: "that passionate energy of the rock installation", and that of the collective, that deep and ambiguous friendship that welds groups but often makes them implode. In Micro, the encounter of the arts is not just discourse: the music is heard, but above all it is seen. ADB

conception, scenography, direction
Pierre Rigal
artistic assistant Sylvie Marcucci
light Frédéric Stoll
audio engineer Joan Cambon, George Dyson

music and performance by Mélanie Chartreux, Malik Djoudi, Gwenaël Drapeau, Julien Lepreux, Pierre Rigal

production compagnie dernière minute
coproduction Festival d'Avignon, Théâtre national de Toulouse, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne E.T.E., TGP-Centre dramatique national de Saint-Denis, Espace Malraux Scène nationale de Chambéry et de Savoie, MC2 Grenoble, L'Athanor Scène nationale d'Albi, La Maison de la Musique de Nanterre
avec le soutien du Gate Theatre London, de la DRAC Midi-Pyrénées, de la Région Midi-Pyrénées, de la Ville de Toulouse et de la Fondation BNP Paribas
Le Festival d'Avignon reçoit le soutien de l'Adami pour la production.