SOUND – listening – GESTURE
in Improvisation

Emmanuelle Pépin, dance and texts,
Lionel Garcin, music

Cefedem AuRA, Lyon, January 24, 2023

On January 24, 2023, Emmanuelle Pépin and Lionel Garcin presented a lecture/performance at Cefedem AuRA in Lyon, “SOUND – listening – GESTURE in Improvisation”. In 2019, during encounters organized by the Centre Européen Pour l’Improvisation (CEPI European Center For Improvisation) in Valcivières (a village in Haute-Loire), Emmanuelle and Lionel had first presented the idea of a lecture/performance on the relationships between dance and music in improvisation. CEPI was created by the bass player Barre Phillips (1934-2024) to promote periodic encounters between artists involved in improvisation practices. These encounters were at first focused on music, but over time they increasingly welcomed dancers (and sometimes also poets and actors as well).
 
The Cefedem Auvergne-Rhône Alpes is a training center for teaching in music schools and conservatories created by the French Ministry of Culture in 1990. The lecture/performance was part of one of the initiatives developed in this institution, “And you, how do you do it?”, which consists of a performance by visiting artists, followed by a debate with the students aimed at explaining the means deployed to achieve the result observed/heard.
 
The lecture/performance at Cefedem was the second time that Emmanulle Pépin and Lionel Garcin attempted this experimental project of giving an account of research in an artistic act mixing written and improvised texts, along with dance and music. From this event, four documents have been produced for publication in the present PaaLabRes 4th Edition:

1. The video of the lecture/performance: Video
2. The text spoken during the lecture/performance: « Spoken » text
3. The entire text by Emmanuelle Pépin that served as basis to the text spoken during the lecture/performance: SOUND – listening – GESTURE
4. The transcription of the discussions with the students after the lecture/performance: After the lecture/performance

Emmanuelle Pépin is a improvisator-perfomer, researcher and teacher in the movement arts and music.
A long career as a performer, choreographer and teacher has led her to instant composition and performance art.
Associate artist of the artistic and educational development space 7Pépinière with Pierre Vion. See 7Pépinière
She remains nomadic at heart, and the world is her playground. She places the human being at the heart of her artistic and educational approach. She believes deeply in the beauty that each person can carry, and how the language of the body can reveal the being.

Lionel Garcin “is an improvising musician: Sound is his raw material, his clay, his marble block… The saxophone is his instrument. A wind instrument, supposedly. But he knows how to exploit all its sonic facets. The saxophone most often takes him to the jazz side of music; the sounds he draws from his instruments and his very particular rhythms would place him more on the side of the acoustic research dear to contemporary music.”
(J­M Lecarpentier)
See Le Grand Chahut.