The printed programs had run out by the time we got there at 8:50pm. In the packed basement of 3537, a gallery run by twenty-somethings out of a historic mansion in the Marais, everyone sat on the floor. It was a bit too warm.
While we waited, there was a QR code that turned the crosslegged spectators into a sea of rhythms and pulses. (I later nicked a left-behind program and found that this was part of a series of entr’actes orchestrated by Irish composer Sebastian Adams.)
“Who is performing?” is a question that emerged as a theme throughout the concert, which was the culmination of a year’s work by graduate students of IRCAM’s “Cursus” program in electronic music. The lines between audience, performance, and recording softened. The cell phones around me decayed and silence settled. There was a large box, about six feet tall, fully enclosed, in the center of the room. Scrapes and thuds seemed to emanate either from inside or from somewhere behind it, on the other side of the audience. Was there someone inside the box? I couldn’t tell. Did it matter? The sounds were amplified now, almost to the point of hurting my ears in their fullness. The piece, it turns out, was created by Julie Zhu (USA) and performed anonymously from within by percussionist Olivia Martin (France). In the program notes, Zhu relates the box to the entire space, and therefore the performer to the audience.
Seamlessly the attention drifted to a screen, directly behind me, cast with mirrored shadows. The shadows seemed to be a projection until I felt the dancer’s body spill to the floor beside me, inches away, on the other side of the filmy screen. Later, audience members were tempted to their feet to kazoo their parts in a traditional Irish folk song originally written, supposedly, by Bono and then stolen with permission.
The final piece was a multidisciplinary creation incorporating sound, choreography, and performance art. Despite its title, “Dionysian Skin” did not project Bacchic energy in its writhing and thrashing. Still, there was something drunk in the anonymous creature’s devouring of the raw performance from within chaotic sounds and flickering lights. Filippos Sakagian, the Greek-Amernian composer and transmedia artist, describes “environments of excess” and technologies that “become his new ‘skin'” during the piece.
Everything about the concert was loud, which was refreshing—a composer friend once dragged me to the front row at a concert in Paris because, he told me, “new music is often very quiet”. Here, there was no front row. There was no second row, either. I’m not even sure I was in the audience at all.
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Tom Gurin is a composer and sound artist in residence at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris while a Master’s candidate at the Geneva Conservatory (HEM Genève). Click to contact him now.