First session > Thursday, November 14, 2pm-7pm
Poetry-action workshops “La Vivance” through text and sound framed by Charles Pennequin.
DESCRIPTIVE
In the first session, we’ll be working from Exozomes, a book I wrote based on discussions with scientists in exobiology, which is the study of living things outside the solar system. So I’ve written texts on “exo-moi”, “exozautres”, “zumins” and “exozomes”. I’ll be reading the text on Le Martien (Détruire dit-elle, from Les Exozomes) and Les Zumins. I’ll also talk about an opera libretto entitled Les Plutériens, which ties in somewhat with the themes of the Exozomes.
The “Pluterians” leave Earth to invade “Plurien”. It’s an opera created with Arfi, an association of musicians from the improvised music scene based in Lyon.
Here’s the presentation:
Les Plutériens ont décidé d’envahir plus rien. The poem is musical, it’s life and death. The Pluterians are in the void of space. They are more or less helped by a quantum laptop, called Cantos. The captain is a woman. Her name is Theremin and she commands the Pluterians, while Velimir is the pilot. He also writes poetry while the cosmonauts are away on their missions. The Pluterians’ mission is to invade Plurien, which is just a few light-years away from the third cluster where Earth used to be. Now Plurien remains, and the mission is to find out if it’s poetically viable. It’s no life to exist, say the Pluterians in chorus, while Vélimir continues to publish his poems in the cosmos.
Perhaps during this session we can write a text that could be transformed into a song, a poetic tune on the theme of the human? In any case, the writing work could lead to a setting in voice, a work on the reading of the text, how to adapt are text to make it something that sounds in the air, to make a frontal poem addressed to the other, a text that leaves the page and stands up to the audience.
This could then lead to work on the living. Or: la vivance, a term given to me by teenage inmates at the Bourges prison. We’d been working on the theme of Dehors and Dedans (in relation to my book Dedans, published by Al Dante), and they said to me: “Dehors c’est la vivance” (“Outside is life”). So I started working on la vivance (which comes up a lot in my writing anyway, in relation to performance art and action poetry, which shouldn’t be confused with theatrical art).
What is vivance? So we’d prepare questions to ask people on the street the next day.
Can we say we’re alive? Can we ask ourselves if what’s inside us is alive? Can we ask ourselves if there are several lives within ourselves? Are we locked in a self that just wants to live? Is this ourselves that is within ourselves differently alive from the selves we have in front of us? Are we who ask these questions alive in the face of ourselves? Does life surpass ourselves within ourselves? Is life growing within us without us really realizing it? Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves whether, for example, we live every day? Are we forgetting the life within us every day? Are there quarters of an hour when we ourselves aren’t really alive? Don’t we spend an inordinate amount of time wondering whether it’s been alive inside us for some time or not? Haven’t we sometimes forgotten to live and gone on longer than we should have? Didn’t we have to wonder about other people’s lives before asking ourselves if we had problems with our own personal lives? Does our personal living being take pills from others? To keep itself alive. Do we take life pills for ourselves? Don’t we wonder if there are several kinds of living beings within ourselves? Aren’t there lots of living things slumbering within us? Do these living beings not exceed our own age? Do we have the age of our own lifetime, or do all the living creatures within ourselves add up to more than enough for us to live on. Is it really so reasonable to have so many people living inside us and hide them from the authorities? Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves whether we need to regulate the life that surrounds us? Don’t we feel that there’s a living thing growing differently within us every day? Don’t we already feel that life has been coming for a long time, and that we ourselves are just passing through this flow, with many others deep inside us, just waiting to emerge as soon as the opportunity arises. Can we make the living movement with just ourselves, or do we need to join forces with you too? Can’t we join forces with the living and take on all the dead around us? Aren’t we a tiny group of the living? A tiny group of the living ready to do battle with the dead in ourselves when the time comes.
We’ll save some time for physical performance exercises.