The Tale of the « Tale »

Louis Clément, Delphine Descombin, Yovan Girard, Maxime Hurdequint

Edition and page lay-out: Jean-Charles François

March 2024

The four protagonists have collaborated to a spectacle entitled “Le Conte d’un future commun” [The Tale of a Common Future] with:

Louis Clément, project instigator, public participation and drawing animation.
Delphine Descombin, storyteller.
Maxime Hurdequint, drawings.
Yovan Girard, music.

The texts are the result of four separate interviews with each artist during 2023, by Nicolas Sidoroff and Jean-Charles François.

Summary :

1. Delphine’s story
2. Architecture’s studies, Louis and Maxime
3. Delphine’s journey to Africa
4. Yovan Girard, the musician.
5. Delphine’s return to France
6. Maxime’s hesitations between architecture and drawing.
7. Yovan ‘s Story (continued)
8. Delphine’s story (continued). Trapeze and storytelling.
9. Louis and Maxime’s stories (continued)
10. Yovan’s Story (continued), the project « A Violin for my School ».
11. Delphine, the Tale of the Skull and the Fisherman.
12. The little notebook with trees. Maxime Hurdequint, Maxime Touroute and Louis Clément.
13. Delphine’s story (continued). The Tale of Tom Thumb.
14. Delphine and storytelling. Maxime and architecture and drawings. Yovan and composition.
15. The Live Drawing Project
16. Delphine : Two tales.
17. Origin of the “Tale of a Common Future”.
18. The AADN immersive project.
19. The “Tale of a Common Future”.
20. Louis, One Year to Reflect.
21. The writing of the Tale. Louis and Delphine..
22. The drawings and their animation, Louis and Maxime..
23. A traditional music of the future?
24. Music elaboration: pre-recorded or live music. Louis and Yovan.
25. Music and storytelling, Delphine et Yovan.
26. Music and storytelling. Louis et Yovan
27. Yovan’s ideas on music and Maxime’s ideas on drawings.
28. The Tale and drawings. Delphine, Maxime et Louis.
29. Sonorization
30. Communication with Notion.
31. Residencies: LabLab, Chevagny, Vaulx-en-Velin, Enghien-les-Bains.
32. Public participation.
33. The artistic and cultural education residency at Hennebont. Louis, Delphine and Yovan.
34. The residencies (continued): Paris, Nantes.
35. Ecology. Delphine.
36. Conclusion

1. Delphine’s Story

Delphine:
Where does the Tale come from? It’s by telling the Tale that we’ll arrive at the Tale… The Tale comes from when I was in high school and I met Marie Jourdain, the daughter of Marie-France Marbach.[1]
 
During high school, I was at boarding school, she was telling me stories all the time. I met her mother and Geo Jourdain. And I loved these people who were completely different from what I had as reference in my family. They woulod take me to school, to the boarding school on Sunday evenings and would bring me back on Friday evenings. I spent a lot of time with Marie, who talked to me about Africa, who told me a lot of stories. After that, I left high school and went to Africa. There, I heard lots of stories, lots of tales. And then, when I came back from Africa, Marie-France absolutely wanted me to tell the story of my trip. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t at all ready to talk in front of people. She took me by surprise, and I often attended her performances. She gave me the opportunity to go to workshops, she really believed in me, when I really didn’t. So, I stayed in close contact with Marie-France.

The boarding school was in Louhans, it was a visual arts school. It was the only high school that accepted me because I had very bad marks, and I wasn’t following school at all. It was my aunt who found this high school that was willing to accept me. I stayed outside. I didn’t go to classes. I was under the trees listening to the birds, I wasn’t in the mood to be locked in a class. Often, the director summoned me, and we had some very interesting philosophical discussions. So, it was as if he had me join the 12th grade philosophy course. Then, he’d ask me what I wanted to do later in life, and I’d say: “I don’t know, maybe take care of goats, perhaps…” I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but it’s true, these were important questions that nobody had ever asked me before. It’s true that I had the chance to meet some special people. And I really liked the visual arts courses. There were two visual arts teachers who were amazing, they took us to Lyon to see exhibitions, we even went to Strasbourg to see museums, it was great, so these were the courses I attended, I was allowed to create things. As for the rest of the courses, I really rejected them, yeah, they bored me a lot. That’s why afterward I took my backpack and I got the desire to go to Africa. The journey lasted quite a long time because I stopped along the way, I didn’t have any money. I worked as a seasonal worker, in hotels-restaurants, I was doing services and they provided lodging at the same time. I sold croissants, I worked in bakeries, I did all sorts of jobs. And then, I met someone in the street who was spitting fire, who taught me how to do it. This was my first real job: we’d spit fire, I’d spit fire and then I’d beg. In fact, I’d blow bubbles in front of a bakery, telling poetry. I hated all this, I found it unbearable, but I always managed to do something.

2. Architecture Studies, Louis and Maxime

Louis:
My background story starts on December 23, 1986. I don’t know how far back I can go, but I think my parents are no strangers to what shaped me. So, I think that if we go back very far, one could say that what shaped me was the discovery of reading, and then above all the reading of what we call imaginary fiction, anything related to science fiction, fantasy, etc. And then, from a more professional point of view, or in any case in terms of my studies, I passed a scientific baccalaureate, then I studied architecture at the Paris-Val de Seine architectural school and graduated from it. At the end of my Licence, I started to realize that architecture wasn’t really for me. In fact, I already had the somewhat utopian idea that becoming an architect would enable me to conceive of spaces in which people would feel good and above all that it would help them to think, to change the world.

Maxime:
My cousin Louis Clément also studied architecture. We’re a year apart, and we didn’t do that in concert, we went our separate ways. I was at the INSA in Strasbourg and he was at the Val de Seine in Paris, we followed our own path. This was a period in our lives when we saw each other less often, but we talked a little about architecture.

Louis:
And then I was confronted with the Master and with the realities of construction, the fact that, if you become an architect, you become a builder. You work in more or less big firms, and ultimately your work is extremely determined by budgetary considerations. And so, I thought that it would not interest so much. Even so, I did my Master’s first year in Antwerp (Belgium), it went fairly well, and I was already starting to think a little that I was going towards performing arts, scenography, etc. And then, in my Master’s second year I sort of eeked by, but I got the diploma all the same. Then I had the chance to work for an architect, I did my Master’s internship at “Scène scénographie”, which is a very good enterprise. We worked on the scenography of the “Musée d’Alésia”, the “Grotte Chauvet II”, so I had the chance to count the stalactites for many hours, this was enormously interesting! Interesting but… It was fun in any case, to work on beautiful projects.

Maxime:
During the last year of high school, I applied to an architecture school, it might have been in Lyon or Grenoble, I went there with my hands in my pockets, thinking: “To be an architect is a trade that you learn, so I’m not going to learn it beforehand!” I crashed, and my only solution was to go to a preparatory school. So then I was in the first year of a preparatory school.

Louis:
And then, when I started to work as an architect, I got a job with François Pin who is an architect who also run a music festival in quarries, in the “Carrières de Normandoux[2], and he created the Marbrerie in Montreuil (a suburb of Paris). I worked on the Marbrerie project, which was one of the biggest projects, the most interesting that I could do as an architect: it was a multi-programmatic project, with an artist’s residency, a swimming pool, a restaurant, an architecture agency, a performance hall, and furthermore I was in charge of sketching it. So, I could have really been very happy, and I stayed almost six months. In fact, it didn’t make me happy at all, so I thought that, if I was not happy there, then I didn’t see what I was still doing in architecture, because, I thought I wasn’t going to find a more interesting job.

Maxime:
With Louis, my cousin, we influence each other, maybe because we know each other very well. That is to say that when we grew up, we saw each other on a regular basis, we never really lost touch. So, this is the reason that it’s always a fluid relationship between us, we never yell at each other, in fact we don’t really need to. I think we adjust one another perfectly, that’s how we influence each other. I imagine that, as we both studied architecture, we speak the same language, it helps us to communicate of certain concepts, I don’t need to explain to him such and such architectural project.

3. Delphine’s journey to Africa

Delphine:
It took me a year, from the age of 17 to 18, to collect enough money for my trip to Africa. I worked during the summer and winter seasons. In any case my mother wouldn’t allow me to cross the border. So, when I turned 18, I immediately crossed the Spanish border. At 18 I no longer feared being prevented from doing so by send police. In fact, I’d already been arrested at police stations, and they were tracking me, they track street people, they have their photos, and they know where they are. They knew I lived on the street, that’s funny, because they didn’t know this until they arrested me.

I went all the way down to Spain. I took the boat in Gibraltar, I arrived in Morocco, and then I went down to Mauritania, and on to Dakar in Senegal. After that, I really wanted to go to Burkina Faso, because I’d met some Burkinabe in France and I wanted to go and visit them, they were dancers and percussionists. So, I took the train to Bamako, Mali, where I took another train to go to Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, it took 48 hours by train to get there, it’s very long. Then I went to Koudougou, they lived there. I stayed there for a while, I was there for a year and a half.

At one point in Africa, I asked myself what exactly I was doing there? What’s the purpose for me to be there? I was white, so, in a subtle way, I didn’t seem to be living there, – look, I wasn’t a tourist! – but I was there, and I didn’t have much to do there, I could simply let myself live, live with the people, but I had the impression of having a real dilemma in my head. We had great discussions, it was super cool what I went through intellectually. For example, in Burkina Faso, we were there drinking tea and talking. They’re really very interesting intellectuals, but it’s not the same kind of intellectuals as in France, we don’t come from the same thing. And in fact, I really missed Western intellectual thinking. It was also lack of books too, of this kind of nourishment, I missed that a lot. And what’s more, it also didn’t make sense for me: there were a lot of problems over there, they couldn’t sell their wheat because there was so much competition, there were societal problems.

I remember once, I was in the desert, and I heard a guy with his tiny radio, and he said to me: “Yes, I think that in your country, things aren’t going very well, there’s a man who might be elected.” In fact, it was Le Pen, against Chirac at the time. And I remember that I said to myself: “What am I doing here, when it’s over there perhaps, that the root of the problem lies?” Everything was beautiful, the landscapes were magnificent, the weather was fine, there was a very cool way of life compared to here. And at the same time, I thought: “I don’t belong here, what am I doing here?” It was a bit of a dilemma. That’s why I came back, it no longer made sense for me to be there.

Going over there saved my life, it saved my ass. When I was in France, people said that I was crazy, my family said that I was crazy, well, I was a bit lost. And when I arrived in Africa, there was that family spirit, something completely natural, I found it super sane, hyper normal. I had lots of difficulties in France, and it was not the case in Africa. When I came back to France, I was part of a bunch of friends, we were a real gang, it was a family for me, something I didn’t have before. All this bunch, they are still my friends.

4. Yovan Girard, the Musician

Yovan:
I’ve been a musician for a long time. I’m basically a violinist, so, I studied classical music and jazz. I am issued from a family of musicians, my father, Jean-Luc Girard, is a composer, he wrote a fair number of pieces, that are, let’s say, classical, but always a bit hybrid. I have the impression I am also following this pathway, in the sense that he also listened to a lot of rock, and he listened to what we played. He liked composers who were a little extraterrestrial, like Frank Zappa (I don’t particularly like Zappa), he always made us listen to plenty of different kinds of music, he wasn’t an ayatollah of jazz or rock, he was quite open-minded. My brother, Simon Girard, is a trombonist, and we’ve always played together. Simon and I had a band, and we played together in a fair number of groups. Simon’s very much into jazz, even if he’s played in popular music groups. At the beginning the connection between us was jazz. I’ve known Louis Clément since early childhood. Louis’ parents, Sylvie Drouin and Dominique Clément, and my parents knew each other very well for a long time.

5. Delphine’s return to France

Delphine:
I went back to France, and I landed in Montceau-les-Mines and there I stayed for a long while. Well, already I’d fallen in love with a boy who was a stone carver and a painter, and I lived there with a bunch of friends in a house with mattresses on the floor. The problem is, when you’re settling down and become sedentary, that’s when you really become poor, because you have to pay the rent, the electricity, the water. Before that I never felt that I was poor. But there, it was really the case, I had no dough and I had to live.

Scene 1: Delphine with the woman social worker

Scene 2: At the Gus Circus.

Delphine:
So, they offered me a job on a subsidized contract, it was my first job, my first long term contract, for six months. Then I stayed to teach children for maybe three years, I don’t remember exactly. I think they renewed the contract once, these were subsidized contracts for non-profit organizations (associations), something not very expensive that was 80% reimbursed by the State, so they were able to do it. An after that, they actually hired me, they figured out that having one more person brought them more children to teach, so it worked for them. So, I worked for the Gus Circus of Saint-Vallier for a certain time, I don’t even know how long…

I worked in all the disciplines: clown, tightrope, trapeze, juggling. I got the BIAC diploma [6] [Brevet d’initiation aux arts du cirqueto teach circus arts. And then, the association imploded from the inside. In fact, it was the students’ parents who were the bosses, and it went very badly, there were conflicts of interest, conflicts of power. As we were just employees, we couldn’t have a say in the matter, it was their decision, and as a result, things exploded, so my friend and me both left. And I went on a professional trapeze training with a trapezist in Moux-en-Morvan, a completely crazy trapezist, Nicole Durot [7], who did performances under a helicopter, under a Montgolfier, in a word, trapeze without security. She’s 60 years old! When she took me on in training, she was still doing that kind of things, she was a warrior. I stayed for six months with her in intensive training.

6. Maxime’s Hesitations between Architecture and Drawing

Scene: Maxime’s meeting with the Venerable Member of the Grand Council.

Maxime:
After my architecture studies at INSA, I worked in Strasbourg, I moved then to Paris where I worked for eight years. In the meantime, I had several experiences in foreign countries, I had an internship in Denmark, and one in Mexico. Then I worked for two months in Tokyo, because it was a culture I really wanted to discover, I dared to send my CV, and they told me: “Let’s do it, come if you like.” I already had maybe two or three years’ experience, so, they took me on for a two-month trial, and then there was no job available to stay. So, I came back, but it was a beautiful experience.

7. Yovan ‘s Story (continued)

Yovan:
At the beginning the connection between my brother and me was jazz. After jazz, I went a lot towards popular music, because I really enjoy composing. I’m in a rap group called Kunta, rap and Ethiopian music, with several instrumentalists. In Kunta, I play keyboard and I rap in English. In fact, I’d been doing a bit of rap on my own for a long time, and it was hard for me to imagine that you could do both playing keyboard and rap. Now I do it from time to time in certain projects, but at first, I didn’t want to mix the two, because it was a bit like two different personalities. So, I played keyboard because it was needed in the group. I simply got into playing Ethiopian scales, what you played on the piano wasn’t too complicated. Now I do both equally, keyboard and voice.

I like making different types of music, in fact I’m not locked in. I’ve already done quite a bit of music with images, notably I did music for a short film by a friend, Pierre Raphaël, and so that’s how I started. Then, I composed music for a theatre play, a modernized version of Cartouche. I’ve always been composing for a long time, doing what you might call “prod” at home on my sequencer with keyboard, plugins, it’s what my “generation” in quote does in the home studio, making the instrumentals to rap on top, but also some couplets, sometimes singing more, trying things out, in short, making music at home. That’s what we call bedroom music. I’ve always done a little of that, whether it’s rap or pop, I enjoyed experimenting because I listen to a fairly big number of different things.

Yovan’s workstation, (photos Nicolas Sidoroff).

Scene 1, Yovan with a stage director [8]

Yovan:
I also composed music for digital arts, for example for an artist called Minuit, Dorian Rigal [9], he makes wall projections and quite a lot of immersive things, he is invited everywhere now, in particular at the “Fêtes des Lumières” in Lyon. I’d already done illustrative music for his scenography. So, the project with the “Tale of the Common Future” is like continuing all this, to compose music with images, for a spectacle, or a show.

Scene 2, at the start of the project of the “Tale for a Common Future”. Louis and Yovan.

8. Delphine’s Story (continued). Trapeze and Storytelling.

Delphine:
To make a living as a trapeze artist, the problem is hanging up a trapeze. I wanted to be autonomous, so I built a yurt (I have still it in my garden), in which I hang a trapeze. Then inside, I could give performances and lead workshops, it allowed me to have an autonomous job. I did this in the Morvan (because I was living in Morvan quite a lot), at La Tagnière in Saint-Eugène. The yurt, it’s something that can be dismantled and reassembled, I’ve never stopped dismantling and reassembling it for 4 or 5 years. I didn’t do performances with words, just with trapeze, impromptu performances with musicians I’d meet.

Scene between the Venerable Storyteller and Delphine.

Delphine:
It was my first performance for the Contes Givrés, it was called “Liberté”. It was a 20-minute performance on a trapeze with a guitar, under the yurt. For the first time it was really a spectacle that we’d designed, sold and performed. And that’s something that has been touring quite a lot at festivals. This brought me closer to Marie-France Marbach, so, I came back around here, I put up the yurt at la Fabrique, a place of residencies for creation in Savigny-sur-Grosne, in Messeugne. I found Marie-France there, and I lived at Pauline’s, who works with Contes Givrés. As she was going on a world tour, to spend a year in Asia, and she left me her flat, because I had nothing, I settled in there.

9. Louis and Maxime’s Stories (continued)

Scene between Maxime and Louis. Architecture and scenography, architecture and drawing.

Yovan’s Story (continued), the Project « A Violin for my School »

Yovan :
I’m currently teaching two days a week for a project called “A violin for my school”. Basically, it’s a social project that aims at reducing school failure through music learning, they called in neurosciences researchers to conduct a 10-year study to see how students behave. It’s an interesting project that concerns students up to age 16 taking violin lessons, sponsored by a Swiss foundation, the Fondation Vareille. In this program, there are a lot of teachers, but certainly not enough, otherwise it’s very good, the students like making music, the violin, they only play violin. The foundation bought a lot of violins for all the students. It’s good for the students do this, they are all in ZEP+ [Priority Education Zone+], which means that certain of them have complicated profiles.

11. Delphine, the Tale of the Skull and the Fisherman

Delphine:
The first story I told was one I heard from Marie-France and loved. It’s the story of the skull and the fisherman:

The Tale of the Skull and the Fisherman

Delphine:
And I liked this story because precisely of this fear of speaking: what is speaking? What should be said? What shouldn’t be said? Do you have the right to say anything? Are you going to have your head chopped off if you say something that you shouldn’t? Perhaps it was my fear of speaking that made me to tell that story, it was one of the first ones I used. And then, after that, what tales did I tell? I found stories, I looked for them in books, my bookshelves are full of books, I read, read, read, a lot of stories. And then, I chose the ones that touched me.

12. The little notebook with trees. Maxime Hurdequint, Maxime Touroute [14] and Louis Clément.

Scene 1: All three of them drink coffee at Louis’ home.

Maxime’s little notebook with trees (photos Nicolas Sidoroff).

Scene 2, sometimes before, Maxime H. and another person.

Scene 3: During Maxime’s architectural studies.

Scene 4: in 2015

Scene 5: return to the first scene with Louis Clément, Maxime H. et Maxime T.

13. Delphine’s story (continued). The Tale of Tom Thumb.

Delphine:
A friend of mine, Florent Fichot, who is an actor, suggested to me that I do something where I would tell things on the trapeze, and so, I was reciting some passages, from Peter Pan for example; it was called “Souffle court” (short breath). We played it at the Théâtre du C2 [15] (in Torcy, in Saône-et-Loire).
 
Then, there was the story of Tom Thumb on the trapeze. Not the story of the real Tom Thumb, right? But Jacques Prévert’s “Petit Poucet” (“The Ostrich”) [16].
 

The Tale of Tom Thumb

Delphine:
At this point, I fell off the trapeze and broke my hand.
 
I think that I was taken by emotion looking at the audience. I fell off the trapeze and broke my hand, as a result I couldn’t speak anymore. The problem with working the trapeze, and telling a story at the same time, is that you have to be there with each part of the body, in the hands, in the legs, with each support point, you have to be concentrated. Except that I was telling a story at the same time, I lost focus and I fell.

14. Delphine and Storytelling, Maxime, Architecture and Drawings, Yovan and Composition.

Delphine:
My wrist was broken, I was operated on in Montceau, and they failed – you should never go to Montceau, you’ll know now – they failed me, I had to have another operation, so that lasted a year. As a result, I’d to earn a living.

Scene: Telephone call with the Venerable stroryteller

Maxime:
Visual arts are hyper wide in range. I don’t know if it’s a rule I’ve set up for myself, but I hadn’t explore that much outside drawing, so some of my friends told me: “Well, try to open up your practice a little.” I think it was good for me to gain confidence little by little with small formats, and gradually, I’ve become more at ease with large formats. As I’ve been doing a lot of skateboarding, and my brother makes skate art, he sculpts on skateboards, he introduced me to that, so, I did some skateboard art, I must have produced about ten of them, and then, recently, I was commissioned to do one on a big surfboard. I think it’s a question of feeling at ease, and after that, you can move on to bigger formats. What’s also amazing about skateboards is having the object in your hands, and being obliged to move with it, to move around it, whereas with the sheet of paper, it’s really only the wrist that’s moving. Here, there’s a relationship with the object, even if you’re not producing the form… I’m discovering all this gradually, bit by bit, as I become more comfortable with my artistic or illustrative approach.

Yovan:
When I compose, I often use a sound that develops in a given time. Sometimes I have to stretch it out a bit, make things longer, and sometimes a bit shorter, that’s why the repetitive side is convenient, and it’s also what you want, an electronic dimension. Normally, when I compose pieces, I have a beginning and an ending, I know where I’m going, and I like to have a little constraint especially for the music I compose for other’s projects or collaborative projects.

Delphine:
So, gently, I started telling stories and, in so doing, also becoming more self-confident. I think that you are completely naked when telling a story: slips of the tongue, tone of voice, all this tells things about yourself. I felt that it was for me a very delicate issue: being in front of an audience, being afraid of their judgment, of judging yourself. I’m very demanding, I’m very critical of myself, so I was very afraid of what I was going to experience with myself. Speaking in front of others, you’re committing yourself, committing a part yourself. I find that very risky, in fact.

Yovan:
And among the sources that have influenced me, there is a musician, actually not quite a DJ, called Débruit [17], who in particular did a project – KoKoKo! [18] – with percussionists from Kinshasa. It’s really interesting, precisely because he respects their work, he uses their music and just adds small electro touches, but doesn’t deform their music. What Débruit does inspired me well before that KoKoKo! project, but it is one of his most accomplished projects, because it really respects traditional music, and then goes for electronic touches to modernize it a bit.

Delphine:
With the trapeze, I gesticulate a lot, and as time goes by less and less, but it’s true that I move a lot, I engage my body a lot, and I work a lot with a double, often a musician. At the start, the guitarist Julien Lagrange [19] was the guy with whom I formed a trapeze-guitar duo, and he’s still participating in tale-guitar performances. That helps me a lot because we work things together, we set-up rhythm, it pushes me to work too, because when you are alone in your kitchen, you do it, but it’s less easy than when you meet someone to work with, so it helps me to be two. Often, after working on the stories with Julien, I also do them without the guitar. It’s reassuring not to be on my own, and that’s how you build things up.

Maxime:
My main activity is as an architect, but I don’t consider that drawing is just a hobby. There are times during the week which are reserved for drawing, so these two activities coexist. One is more important than the other, but as I’ve participated in exhibitions and I sometimes had commissions, I’ve also been able to sell certain works. Of course, the artistic part of my life is not the one that feeds me, but at the same time, I’ve been able to go further with it. I began by having an exhibition in a café in 2020, where I showed several drawings I’d made during and after my trip to Asia. I also made some drawings on skateboards, I’d done one tryptic and one diptych of skateboards, again in that style. In 2021, I’d an exhibition in a restaurant shared with another artist, I used the theme of the Mayas, because I’d been to Mexico. I had done for this exhibition a triptych of 3 skateboards, and a diptych of 2 skateboards with another artist working in a completely different universe. The same year I participated in a skate art exhibition in Roubaix, I sent in a diptych on the theme of Japan, some people got interested and bought it. It was very funny: a lady offered it to her husband, a former skateboarder and she said: “He is a fan of Japan, he loves skateboarding, I felt it was his style. We’ve put it in good place in our living room.” I was delighted.

Delphine:
I turned primarily to young audiences, I thought it was less judgmental. In a way, it’s harder, because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, that is they’re not going to pretend that it’s good. There is something about children, where if it doesn’t work, you know it straight away, there’s no two ways about it. And at the same time, there’s less judgment in relation to references, to labels, to what already exists.

Maxime :
Then we did a group exhibition in 2022 with my brother and another artist, where this time it was only skateboards that we sculpted. We decided that for each of us, there would be one skateboard we would do entirely ourselves, another that we would share with one of the other two artists, and the third would be shared with the other artist.

Yovan :
I work with Cubase. It’s not obvious, people don’t understand why. Everyone’s on Live. When I am on my computer, I don’t use Live often, in fact I never use it. It was always a bit of a struggle to say: “Well, I am on Cubase”. And during the first residency we had in Lyon, the sound engineer told me: “Ah! but I’m working on Live, you have to learn Live”, and finally he was a bit at a loss and so was I. We found a common ground and he saw that I had the latest Cubase version with the same functionalities, he understood quickly, and he showed me how to adapt the pieces in 7.1 [20] for a spatialization. I’d never done that, it stressed me a bit at first, so I said: “Well, that was an interesting thing to do.”

Delphine:
You have to be very demanding about what is told and by whom: if you tell a story that has been already told by such-and-such a person, or that comes from such-and-such a place, it might be poorly seen. For example, to tell a story that has been written by Henri Gougaud, because he’s a guy who takes up traditional tales, and puts them in his own name, you can’t do that. Or take up a story told someone else, you can’t copy-and-paste. You have to be careful with what you do, in fact, you can’t tell just anything. You have to respect everyone’s work, always say what’s the origin of your stories, from where it comes, from what country, from what culture. And as with any work, I think that as soon as you put your foot in it, the more you realize that there is work to do, it’s without end.

Maxime:
And last year (2022) we had a collective exhibition of surfboards at the Lyon City Surf Park near the Décines football ground. It was the opening vernissage of this sports facility, and they had asked 20 artists to draw on surfboards. I produced this work on Moroccan theme, because it’s quite well-known in the world of surf, I was inspired by Moroccan arts and I added the sea at the end.

Delphine:
When I speak of rhythm, it’s the rhythm of narration. Because often, there are moments when it’s almost singing, there are refrains that are repeated, and an ending. It has to grow in intensity, it has to decrease. There’s a real rhythm to the creation of a story. What is hard with the “Tale for a Common Future” is that it’s a very long story, so it’s more difficult to get into a rhythm.

15. The Live Drawing Project

Louis:
And then, I switched to video projection, and I started to design this first project that worked correctly, it was the “Live Drawing Project”, which was clearly the result of a meeting with Maxime Touroute, Maxime Hurdequin, and me. I met Maxime Touroute at a mapping workshop, he had just arrived in Lyon, and each one of us had in turn to present ourselves, and he said that he was working as a developer for Millumin. Maxime Hurdequin is my cousin, so, we’ve known each other since early childhood.

Maxime:
With the three of us, we organized a lot of working time together. At many times, even though we were working side by side, each one of us would work on our own. But there wasn’t this feeling of distance between us. With the Live Drawing Project, the heart of the matter remained the computer, it was really Maxime Touroute who coded, and then there were a lot of tasks that came into play: the communication part, the project management, preparation, set-up.

Louis:
In fact, there are three software programs that exist to do « mapping » and work very well, Resolume that I use, Madmapper which was designed by Swiss people and well known in the trade, and Millumin that tried to find a place in the performing arts.

Maxime:
It will be quite different with the “Tale of the Common Future” where the branches join together at the end during the residencies, and the rest of the time there is not much need to communicate with each other.

Louis:
And we thought that it might be to have people draw in order for their drawings to appear on a screen in real time.

Maxime:
For the Live Drawing you need to know what you are capable of doing and whether you can really encode as you go. OK, there, Louis, do you think that we will get there doing this on this interface?

Louis:
Well, no, it’s impossible, we cannot do it.

Maxime:
Hop ! So, you must have a lot more exchanges, because, the skills are much more linked together, it’s a constant ping-pong.

Louis:
And one month later we participated to the “Fête des Lumières” in Lyon.

Maxime:
During the “Fêtes des Lumières” in Lyon, it was in a bar, the Club des Lumières. The bar tender had stated: “I’ll give you 150 bucks for three days and you make me an event ‘Fêtes des Lumières’.” So we showed him our idea, I had made three drawings to explain it, and Maxime Touroute, did the coding every night for ten days, and it works very well. And what’s more, people would have enough to do, and only make one or two drawings and that’s it. We thought that when we proposed a little theme, draw a flower, draw a tree, we thought that people will have their own task at hand, and only make a small drawing, and that’s it. In fact, not at all, people get really interested, they stay for an hour drawing next to each other, saying: “Look at mine, look at mine!” And in the end, we realize that the more drawing themes we gave, the more people ideas people had, or they wouldn’t follow the proposed theme at all. I think we had found a really open tool. It’s true, we can’t deny this, that people had the tendency to look at their own phones in an individualist way, but because they were drawing right next to one another, they were also exchanging words with one another. And then there were those who didn’t draw, they looked at the big screen where the drawings were projected. We realize that when we passed between the people, things happened, people chatted, they showed each other things, it gave them ideas. We thought: “Yeah, that’s cool, we have got something there that’s rich”. That’s what we developed with Maxime Touroute and Louis, this tool, the Live Drawing Project, a project of participatory drawings that we enriched as we went along.

Louis:
And after that, it got rolling, we are now at our 140th projection.

Maxime:
With the Live Drawing project, when we use it, it’s really a big remote control. Maxime Touroute provided lots of keys: there is a key to change the color of the drawings, one to make them bigger, one to make them smaller, etc. And you can make crossfades, and things like that, but we are not really telling a story; we simply animate the images to avoid always having the same visuals, but it’s not narrative. By contrast, the “Tale of the Common Future”, with the Resolute software, and the fact that there is a storyteller, is really very narrative.

Louis:
We have been touring about everywhere in the world, it has worked super well.

Maxime:
This has been going on since 2018 until now. We had other gigs in 2019 and 2020. It became gradually better remunerated; we were able to buy a video projector, get an association to take care of the administrative side. So, little by little we became more professional. We travelled to Canada, to Denmark. Then there was the Covid confinement, so we developed tools specially for the confinement, by organizing remote communication events. This was for us a good source of revenue, we did it again with Denmark, this time in tele-conference. We are present in many countries, lately in Burma for example.

Louis:
And I told myself at some point that I would like to tell stories with this interface, to be able to do something participatory, and also tell a story so that the spectator would play an active role in shaping the narrative. As it happened, we did our first residency four years ago at LabLab in Villeurbanne [21] (a suburb of Lyon). That’s when we started to use this tool to tell a very short story: the coming to life of a digital anomaly. It was a very short 15 minutes tale, maybe even shorter. It took us four or five days to put it together. At that time, there was no tale yet. There was just a text projected on the screen, as with subtitles for a moving image. The public would draw things before entering the performance space, for example stars. In fact, what we wanted to test was the different types of interaction with the public, how we could get them to participate beforehand, during the projection, while looking, how to make them stop, etc. This residency helped me a lot afterwards in writing, and particularly interacting with the public. Maxime Hurdequint participated in the creation of the basic concept and after that he was doing the management of the project, publicity, looking for places to do it, he did quite a number of budgets templates, when we had to get people to sign, etc.

16. Delphine: Two Tales

Delphine:
With Julien, now, we present the tale of “Peter and the Witch”, it’s a traditional children’s story. I mention this one because it’s very rhythmic, between what I say and what he plays.

The Tale of Peter and the Witch

Delphine :
There is also

The Tale of the Gingerbread Man

Delphine:
So, Julien and me, we have some very well synchronized cues between us. He performs very near me, we know each other very well, he knows how I tell the story, so, we can improvise things together. We work a lot together face-to-face, even though we also do a lot of work on our own. I can give him the story that I want to tell on paper, or in a book. He brings his own stories too, and he says: “Ah! I’d like to hear that story, I think it’s cool, and plus I’ve got a musical universe for it”. I work a bit on my own, and he work a bit on his own, about roughly what we want to do. And then, we work on getting things in place. And we say: “Let’s do it!”

17. Origin of the “Tale of a Common Future”

Scene 1: The telephone rings at Delphine’s home. It’s Louis Clément

Delphine:
So, Louis came to see my Jabuti performance at the Mâcon multimedia library: a trapeze performance, actually. We put the trapeze back on, because I’ve got a friend who is also trapezist. I’ve got a circus network around me. Jabuti was a spectacle of storytelling-trapeze-flute. It was a stroll: we went strolling with the public around the media library and led them to the trapeze. So, he came to see the performance, and that’s how we met for the first time.

Louis:
So, that’s how we crossed paths. Anyway, I arrived a little early before the performance, we had a chat, I explained the project, how it will happen, etc. After that, she presented her project, I had to go back to Lyon before the end of the performance, so I didn’t have time to debrief at the end.

Scene 2: New telephone call from Louis to Delphine.

18. The AADN Immersive Project

Yovan :
The project of the Tale for a Common Future was initiated by Louis. It was his first real spectacle, he had at first few ideas that were still brewing, he knew what he wanted to do but he had difficulties putting his ideas into concrete form. So, when we started talking about it, he had in mind a first team and above all he was looking for funding, in any case, so that we could get places to enable us to create the immersive aspect of the spectacle. A first proposal was put forward, it came close, but it didn’t work. Then, once we got the funding from AADN for this immersive project in planetariums, let’s say in certain towns in France, we started to talk about writing the spectacle, because it was about one year before the first performance.

Maxime:
It started that way. Louis had the intuition to bring us together. In 2019, we organized a residency to try to tell a story using Live Drawing. We made a 5-minute piece, with very, very simple graphics, frankly, it was great. Telling stories became a possibility, but at this point we didn’t go any further. It gradually germinated along the way.

Louis :
And then there was the call for proposals by AADN (Arts & Cultures Numériques) [22] – I was a benevolent member of its Executive Board. They launched a call for immersive creation. It interested me a lot because I started going to see immersive full dome spectacles, and I thought it was pretty crazy, well, it was rather amazing! The immersion that was felt in front of these images aroused my interest. The AADN point of view was to bet on collective immersion, that is to get many spectators to participate in an experience, rather than to have an individual immersion as in virtual reality (with headsets). I liked the idea of going against individual forms of immersion. We’re talking today of the « Metaverse » [23] it means that it’s either about immersing yourself individually in a collective thing or it’s about collectively immersing yourself in a work: you’re all together.

Maxime:
So, it’s Louis who really comes up with the concept, he knows already what he wants to do, and who he wants to work with. We found a first storyteller, but in the end, we didn’t necessarily get the grants we wanted, so we ended up finding a second storyteller, Delphine, and Louis had already found Yovan for the music, who he knew very well. And we got the immersive grant in 2021.

Louis :
We answered the AADN call for projects, I don’t remember the exact date. I took a certain number of decisions: I started by telling this story, I came up with the name of “A Tale of a Common Future”, in retrospect, I think that it speaks to a lot of people. After a first refusal to our proposal for the AADN Call for immersive projects, we resubmitted a project. And this time we got it and the AADN agreed to take us on as a delegated production, which meant that they’d help us raise money and to get performances. And from that moment we have to produce written proposals and start the residencies. I’d been working with Maxime Hurdequint with the Live Drawing, we couldn’t do without his drawing skills, I asked him to make the sets. I thought that a musician was needed, so obviously I asked Yovan Girard, whom I admire a lot, he made a lot of music with a sensibility that I like. He usually composes strictly musical pieces, but he had already done a theater piece with someone. I know he can do it too. We’ve known each other since early childhood, my parents and his parents are very close friends, my mother and his father went to high school together, I think.

19. The “Tale of a Common Future”

Louis :
So, I set up a calendar for creative actions, we decide on dates, we start doing things together, etc. I continue in parallel to seek more fundings on my own. While this Call to immersive projects grant brings us some money, it’s not enough to pay everybody all the time, and what’s more, I ask people to work outside the residency periods. We’ve submitted I don’t know how many applications to various organizations. For example, we submitted three times a proposal to the Hybrid Creation in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes before getting something from them, and also we applied to the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma) and we were successful, as a result we obtained a substantial amount of money. Thanks to that I can breathe a little easier, because I’ll be able to pay people properly for their creation, this is for us a great chance.. And then, we also got some funding from SACEM (music author’s right society). And we were able to do another residency, at the LabLab, and to pay the Enghien-les-Bains Centre des Arts residency, that was not otherwise renumerated. This residency lasted two weeks, because the place by chance was available. They would provide the place, but that’s all, they didn’t do any co-production, they didn’t give us any money for that.

Before finding the title of the “Tale of a Common Future” (Conte d’un futur commun), I was thinking that the reactions of the public should be able to inflect the story’s unfolding. If it was written, we would have arborescent scenarios, with multiple choice trees, this was going to be potentially very complex. And then, there was that idea of a story told around a fire, with people participating, that kind of thing. What pleased me was the opposition between the tale as one of the oldest forms of “art” with its manner of telling stories, and the participatory side, the smartphones, the projection, you had to find a balance between the two. So, I decided that it could be a tale.

Delphine, Maxime, Yovan and I started to work together on this project. I really had already the whole universe of the tale in my head. The first time Delphine and I met, I had the whole unfolding of the story. I knew where it starts, what you are going to see, and how it all ends. In fact, I didn’t really know the storyline, but the places where it happens.

20. Louis, One Year to Reflect

Louis :
For a year, practically nothing happened, there were no meetings or anything else. I was thinking on my own, in a rather introspective way. Nothing specific was emerging, but I read an enormous number of books, no longer just for “pleasure”. I made a huge list of works to read. These are all references to concepts, people, thinkers, projects that inspire me, from people who would talk about how they were writing about this topic.

During this year of thinking about the project, when decisions had to be made, it was all in my head, at no time had I written down anything. I formalize things in my head, I just say to myself: this is going to be like that, we’ll start there. And then there was this idea of going to visit places where there are communities living in harmony with their environment, and that, in fact, cannot be done in a hurry: one would do a complete tour of the environment, in the forest, the mountain, through the airs, under the water… And then, I thought, on account of their importance, the city should be a big thing, which will not disappear, so we needed to find an interesting way to inhabit this town. I read a lot of stuff on re-wilding in fashion, like Baptiste Morizot [24], all those people speaking about how to give back a place to nature in the city.

21. The writing of the Tale, Louis and Delphine

Louis :
With Delphine, we meet a first time for two days. At the beginning, I come with my story, but in fact I really have only the places of action, and Delphine is the one who’s going to knit everything together, the relationships between the characters, how they are going to be, how they’ll talk to each other, and that helps me a lot. I present my ideas to her and how they might be developed: I want the heroine to go there, and there, and there…

Delphine:
I draw, I write, and then, on my own I go over it again, I reimagine what it looks like, and I find a way to say it. And then, when I’ve found it, I can fix it on paper, and I put the texts on my computer. But after that, I keep modifying them a lot.

Delphine’s notes (photo Nicolas Sidoroff).

Delphine :
That’s why I have lots and lots of texts on my computer. When I am working in the residencies, I need to have written papers that I cross out, that I correct directly, you see, for example here, it’s all corrected. I am lost if it’s too much a shambles. It also has to be clear in my head, that’s why I write a lot of texts. Writing the tale starts always with paper, because I’m in the habit of writing by hand. Louis is on the sofa and says to me: “OK.”

Scene 1: the first working session between Delphine and Louis.

Delphine’s notes (photo Nicolas Sidoroff).

Scene 2: the same, a little later.

Delphine’s notes (photo Nicolas Sidoroff).

Scene 3: the same, biocracy.

Scene 4: the mudslide

Scene 5: the propel stretch.

Scene 6: The abandoned zone.

Louis:
It’s Delphine who writes the text since she is the one speaking. I say, “you have to say that”, and she writes it. She takes notes, I give her the places and the humans, she writes and then she starts to tell it. When she has the time to do it, she makes a recording of herself and sends it to us, and then she reworks this until it helps her to make its way to her head, she has a storyline, and so she is able to take away some bits and pieces and add other ones. She sends audio files or some text, it depends, and often the big jobs are done during the residencies.

Delphine:
Louis on the sofa doesn’t write, I’m the one who does that. He’s more on his phone, searching things. For example, recently we were looking for submarine cities, he’s going to search to see what it looks like, what really exists, so that you can draw inspiration from this. Or when I said to him: “Ah! give me a synonym for this or that, because I am in the process of writing, and I don’t find the word.” Snap, he looks for it. I ask him questions: “Ah! what do you think she will do if she did that? Is it possible that she would rather do that?” – “Ah! yes, wait a minute, no, but that’s because she just does it that way!”. And me: “OK, yes, you’re right.” That’s it.

Louis:
After it’s a matter of details, I correct very little of what she’s done, I give my opinion, but I don’t say: “Tell it this way, tell it that way.” I know that she is the one who is going to speak the text. Delphine doesn’t think to consider herself as improvising, there is always a text, but she modifies the text as she speaks, for her it’s a question of memorization, the way in which her brain memorizes what will come out of her mouth, but she modifies the text a little. She listens to her recorded voice reading the text, and she changes things accordingly. When she learns it by heart, it modifies all by itself in her head. She has a mental map she’s made of where it goes, a pathway that unfolds.

Delphine:
I don’t have any memorization problems because once I take this path, I know it’s going straight and it’s rolling on. Usually, I take a text, a story, that already exists, that I’ve heard, or I’ve read, so I have a text, something like a basic traditional story. Then, I put my own chosen words, but the story still exists. Sometimes I improvise around the text. I often work on improvisation at home, but I keep the thread of the story, I don’t betray it. Even if the texts are sometimes completely written, if the text is effectively well written, and you have a refrain, this kind of little fredaine, it’s good to respect it, because it gives rhythm to your story. Often even when the stories are well written, you can really transform the way the story is written, and to tell it in a different manner, but most of the time, you keep the story line. When it’s me who writes the text, I can do what I want, if not, I have to respect it. When I’m working on a text, I search for my words by saying them loud as if I had an audience in front of me, and when I find a sentence that clicks, paf! I write it down quickly, hop! OK! I repeat it out loud and then I continue. Fixing what I say in writing means I don’t forget it, it would be a shame to when you find a sentence that has a beautiful music. It’s when I find my words, my music, that it immediately takes hold, I can recall it because it fits well. It’s when I find the right words that I can remember them better.

22. The Drawings and their Animation, Louis and Maxime H.

Scene 1: Telephone call between Maxime H. and Louis.

Maxime :
Concerning the ways to adapt the drawings to the situation under a dome, at the beginning I had no idea what size, what level of precision I needed to make the drawing. I didn’t know, when I put my drawing in the dome, if it was going to be too small or too big, so in fact, I made it so that the drawing could be repeated laterally. That is, when you have a drawing, if you make a photocopy, for example, and place it to the left side of the initial drawing, then it connects perfectly, and so it’s infinite. I thought that if I had to draw a forest, I would start by drawing four trees, and after that I could reproduce the pattern ad infinitum. So, I could adjust according to the situation, if I realized that I needed to reproduce four times the drawing to go around you, or if it took eight times, I could in this way adjust my production, knowing that you have to be aware that if it’s too out of sync, I could stretch my drawing a bit to be at the right height. In any case, I bet on the idea of reproducing the pattern.

Scene 2: Maxime and a member of the technical team

Louis :
Concerning the animation of the drawings, I get one of Maxime’s drawings with inverted color, with black background instead of white. When we work under a dome, he has already processed the image to fit the dome. And then, from there, I combine them together to make it the way I want, given that the aim of animation was really to make something very simple at the beginning, and after to complexify it as the story unfolds. I enter an image into the software, and thanks to this I can animate it, displace it, and add effects, stylistic effects, on top of it. And then, to animate the images I have to launch something, so that it moves in a certain way, at a certain speed, so that it goes up or down, etc. Basically, the software is not designed to do that, but I use it that way. Then, I make some cross-fades, be it a cross-fade to black then another image, or one with another image appearing on top, or other options. And I make things move inside the image, or I add a transparency, that is, I add another image on top of the first one and I make it move over it. For example, I make the masks of the Great Council go up, fairly simple things like that. During all the first residencies, I struggle to work the control buttons, to make the image go up. Then afterwards, I have to go back to previous states of things, and once we’ve finished, the loop is ready to go, I have to go back to the beginning and remember where things are located, so as to be able to reset them to zero, and then to relaunch them, so that when I click on the thing again, it restarts the animation at the right place.

I’d done a clip for Kunta, which is Yovan’s group, I participated in a residency with them at the LabLab, where I was doing the video projection part for them (there was a guy filming), and we’re having a hell of a time, because I was on Resolume, and they had a thing where it’s precisely timed on their Medlay [27] to the second. And so, the videographer redid exactly the same shot seven times, so he could do the editing inside. It meant that all my video clips had to be timed to the nearest thousandth. Well, it was a struggle, it took us two days to do it, it was endless. Then I thought: “Never this again! It’s really too horrible.”

Scene 3: Louis, a colleague, and the software Chataigne.

Louis :
So, I start working on Chataigne, I’m relying on simple tutorials, there’s documentation, etc. I’m more or less able to launch my first clip on my own: if I press such and such a letter, it triggers the clip. But I found out that it’s better to put it on a timeline, because if I have to use all the keyboard keys, I might hit the wrong key and it wouldn’t work anymore. With the timeline, each time I press the space bar I launch something, and I can press it a second time to stop it.

Scene 4: the same, later.

Louis :
So, I tried it and it worked, however, I can’t do everything, because Chataigne works well with Resolume, but I can’t retrieve the drawings, I can’t adapt Live Drawing with Chataigne. Precisely. To be exact, I can’t do it all the time, I still have to be behind my computer at certain times, especially when there’s the public participating, if only to see what they are writing. So, when it’s running, if I encounter some troubles, I have to phone friends to know how to do things. As with all the projects, it’s always happening that way.

Scene 5: Louis and the software Chataigne.

Scene 6: Louis and Maxime. Projection under the dome.

Maxime:
I could have chosen a much simpler way of drawing to fit the diverse projection formats. I could have, I think, drawn directly on an iPad, and done everything with a computer. But I work with computers all day long when I’m an architect, I really wanted to go through the felt-tip pen. It’s a rather archaic choice, everything starts with a sheet of paper sheet and a felt-tip pen. In order for my drawings to follow each other, I make my first drawing, then I place something like a bookmark with the same height as the drawings on the right-hand side of the drawing and so I extend it. Then I take this bookmark and put it on the other side of the sheet, and I extend it again in a way that it will fit. It’s this little bookmark that I can slide to the right or on the left, which will ensure the continuity of the juxtaposed drawings. It’s true that that’s very simple to show, but rather difficult to explain.

Sometimes, I worked with tracing paper: at the beginning of the piece, there’s a forest and then, there’s a city in the forest. So, I had two solutions: either I stayed archaic, and drew the forest a second time, adding the city, or I would use a old-fashioned tracing paper and would draw the city on top. That’s what I did, so I saved a lot of time, and was able to concentrate more on other things. That way, sometimes, the final drawing doesn’t really exist, it’s not completely on a single paper. It’s not as such usable for an exposition. At another moment, there is a flying vessel, I drew the vessel empty first, because we didn’t have much time. I thought it’s no big deal, I’ll just put a piece of paper on top and draw all the characters, and so if I mess up on a character, it’s all right, I am not going to lose my vessel, I will have a second chance. When I am not completely confident, I have this possibility to superpose several layers of drawings that can then function together with the computer. This is a freedom that’s quite pleasant, when you draw, everything comes from the hand, but afterwards, you can reassemble, you can correct, you can also erase things.

Using the computer, it can happen that little jointures are not always perfect, given my famous archaic technique of a bookmark, then I need to make adjustments. Consequently, I’ve found I’ve erased more when making adjustments than when reworking a drawing because of blemishes on it, like an accidental drop of coffee on my completed drawing. The computer can save me from time wasting mistakes.

Scene 7: Louis and Maxime.

Maxime:
The sketches are made in black and white in a very loose manner, that is I let the wrist to guide me, and then, when the sketch begins to take shape, I add colors to distinguish a little the different elements.

Maxime’s sketches (photo Nicolas Sidoroff).

Maxime :
The way in which I draw is based on patterns that repeat themselves. At first, I try to find in the sketch the recipe ingredients, so from there I’m cooking things. For example, there are many trees in the drawings, so, I find the good form of a tree.

Maxime’s sketches (photo Nicolas Sidoroff).

Maxime :
Then, if it’s a city, I find the pattern of a facade, and in the case of the city, there are passageways for the animals, I’ve found a solution for this by suspending the passageways on balloons. After that, everything is assembled, I make sure that it’s always intermingled, you can see that it’s intermingled, but it doesn’t clash together. This is more or less the way I make my drawings, to have a sort of harmony between many ingredients.

Maxime’s sketches (photo Nicolas Sidoroff).

Maxime:
I draw my first sketches with a pen, not a pencil. When I get down to the final drawing, I use a pencil to outline the main axes, that is the drawing will not be entirely made with pencil, but you’ll have the silhouette of the main elements. Then I draw them immediately with a felt-tip pen. At the end, I erase the small silhouettes I made at the beginning. Thus there are quite a few lines structuring the drawing.

I usually do my drawings with a pencil and erase this at the end, I rarely need to go back to it. I’ve done a few drawings where I try to ignore the rules of perspective, I respect them a little, but I’m quite free. Some scenes are indoor, and I wanted to do something with the right proportions, so here, it takes a much longer time: I spent maybe 2 or 3 hours just on the pencil drawing, erasing, drawing, erasing until I’ve really found the drawing, and in this case, I entirely redraw with a felt-tip pen, but it’s almost more a coloring work. Then, there are a lot of drawings where it’s a very loose outline, and straight away a completed drawing. In my drawings I use different approaches.

There is a part during the piece where the animation of the images is predominant and at the start, I don’t know how we’re going to do it. I make lots of drawings, but I don’t know how we’re going to animate them. I trust Louis, thinking he’ll know how to make the transition from, let’s say, the forest to the city, he might do a fade in black, or he will make the image appear gradually, so he is the one who is doing the true artistic creation by linking things together. So, there are characters, there are elements to integrate into the image, it’s him who will position them, and make them move (because we have some objects that move).

Projection, 2023, May 4th (photo AADN).

23. A traditional music of the future?

Scene 1: Louis et Yovan.

24. Music Elaboration. Pre-recorded or Live Music. Louis and Yovan.

Scene 1: Louis and Yovan.

Yovan:
We wrote the funding proposal based on these ideas, and afterwards obviously it was realized a bit differently. Before submitting the proposal to AADN, Louis had asked me to compose a piece – given that it was just a project of which I knew a little the concept, but I didn’t really know much more – in relation to the specifications we’d set for the music on the proposal, I tried to create a piece a bit like that. I had started on an “instrument” based on some sample of African drumming, and it had at the end created a little piece. It was just a question of having a little bit of music, and after that it completely changed. This sample of African drumming was reused in the spectacle – it was the first segment I did – just when she flies over the forest at the beginning. After that I composed the intro piece with the sounds of birds and of the forest, because it’s when Delphine presents the forest.

Louis:
To be honest, I was not expecting that he would use his voice. You should know that Yovan is currently a singer: it’s practically all that what he does now. Yovan plays the violin live, but his voice is recorded, because he used it by superposition of his own voice to produce a choir effect, he records himself on a fair number of things. When I heard what he first sent me, I thought that it was not at all what I wanted, but in the end, I love it. In effect, this has nothing to do with the traditional music of the future, that’s not what he does.

Yovan, 2023, May 4th (photo Valentin Bisschop).

25. Music and Storytelling, Delphine and Yovan

Yovan:
Then Delphine came along, and once she had put the story into words, it was a matter of finding the moments where I would have space for music. I asked Delphine to record her voice, so that I could listen to what she was telling.

Delphine:
So, I sent a recording to everyone, and they listened to it at home over and over again. With Yovan, we created things together, and we were lucky because we got on really well straight away. He pre-recorded music on what he’d heard from me, and we both tried things out together to see how it fit. There were things he’d done that didn’t fit. Because once I was telling the story for real, it didn’t work. I had sent him the text, but when it came to telling the story, it was another matter. He had to change, and to do a lot of work in adapting the music to a storyteller.

Yovan:
Delphine is the one who influenced the most the final sound result, because I listen to the way she tells the story.

Scene: Delphine and Yovan.

26. Music and Storytelling, Louis and Yovan

Louis:
It’s not because the music is written that it’s completely fixed, there are many moments when he plays loops, and he produces a certain amount of noises to correspond to the action on stage.

Yovan:
Later, we found other solutions: for example, against a wall, an acoustic wall with holes (there are plenty of little squares in the walls), so we put our fingers in them, “Brrrrrrrrrrr”, it sounded a bit like wing noises, a sort of electronic firefly noise. I made this sort of sounds. Otherwise, I went on Spice where there are sound samples, the Sonotec, and interesting stuff like that. The sounds that we used were often nature sounds, and then it depended on the situations. At some point, there is a story of a snap hook, when she hooks herself on a cable, you have to find a snap hook sound. When you can’t find this online, you have to fabricate it, it’s another type of work. At another moment in the piece, there are the lightning hunters who start to sing, it’s really what the text says, so I wrote a song a bit like a pseudo-Gregorian chant, it’s not really that, but it’s something kind of epic.

Scene 1: Delphine, Louis and Yovan.

Yovan:
I also sing a little, I use it for having choirs in my compositions (by re-recording my voice) or just a single voice, but I don’t pretend to be a singer.

Scene 2: Delphine, Louis and Yovan

Yovan:
For me it was far too many ideas, this is what was difficult, in any case at the beginning, to figure out what to do with them. It was because Louis’ role was to imagine things, it was really a good thing, because the universe he wanted to develop is very interesting, but then, he brings along so many things in addition to the scenario, the idea of talking about ecology, the drawings, the storyteller, the music, the live music, several instruments (etc.), that you have simply to make some choices at a certain point.

Scene 3: Louis and Yovan.

Yovan:
So, things are coming together little by little because we had to think about everything, it was for all of us our first spectacle, we hadn’t given it much thought. Louis had the concepts, but he didn’t have all the keys of this ambitious project. But it’s a good thing, because we learned lots of things along the way, we discovered the world of noise effects, and so on.

27. Yovan’s Ideas on Music and Maxime’s Ideas on Drawings

Yovan:
I knew Maxime a little before. I’d not seen much of his drawings, but I knew he was working in architecture. I also knew him through Louis’ Live Drawing Project. Maxime’s drawings straight away create an atmosphere, a little like a giant graphic novel, that’s what I appreciate a lot. The question is then to decide how much storytelling, how much music, how many drawings to put in. Because once you’ve put the drawings in, some say: “Well, there should be more of that” and others say: “There should be less of that, because you’re not looking at the storyteller.” It was very ambitious, because there is so much stuff, that’s the normal way of making a spectacle. I didn’t see the drawings until the residencies because Louis receives the drawings, and he has to adapt their format for projecting them in the specific space. Then, sometimes I thought: “Hey, it would be nice to have something like you have in the scenography of an electro concert where such and such an image appears during the music, that is in some particular timing.” In the end, it turned into “cues”: “There, I throw this music when a drawing appears, it would be nice if we were immediately in a new atmosphere.” There are few “beeps” like that. Personally, I’d have liked to have more communication, but well, it does communicate a little anyway, but I think we could go even further with it in the future.

Maxime:
What I like in the “Tale of a Common Future”, and what I find extremely astonishing, it’s really the hybrid construction of the project. In fact, we never intrude on each other’s work, and that’s the way Louis built the team. It’s him who comes up with a story that he builds up as he goes along, with enough information to enable us to invent things. Sometimes, when he gives us information, I have the impression that he hasn’t really the image in his head. So, I say to myself: “OK, I don’t know where I am going, but I’ll show you something and we’ll see.” So, I think it’s the same with Yovan and Delphine, where we bring our ideas, and then, in the exchange, the things evolve slightly, and Louis is still very flexible about what he wants. In other words, he knows the essence of what he wants, but he doesn’t need to control the form of what he wants. At times, I took him where he hadn’t planned to go, but he said: “OK, it’s in line with my story.” I think he did a good job of linking us up, and we were each able to have our own “corridor” (in quotation marks) of expression, which added up without being in each other’s way, going from strength to strength. That’s what I like in this project, we each work a bit in our own corner, me at my desk, Yovan, I don’t know where, Delphine, I imagine, on her computer to write texts, and at the end, we add up, and this makes the thing even better.

Yovan:
The format of the composition was a bit like electronic music, with the repetitive aspect that can be found in techno, in electro music, but with a musical idea, and so, there is often a repetitive beat. The direction I took was to start with something based on an organic instrument or something like that, for example a Chinese instrument that resembles a banjo. In short, it was starting off with a traditional music instrument and then having at the same time that electronic aspect. I knew in any case that the pieces couldn’t be too long because we soon realized that when Delphine was telling the story, and in relation to all the worlds that Louis wanted to explore, it would be impossible to linger. During the week I was composing on my own, I thought: “Hey, it would be good to have these three pieces, simply because afterwards I won’t have the time to do the rest before the first residency when I am supposed to have written it all. I’m not going to linger on each composition, and eventually as there’s a very repetitive side to it, it’s something that I can develop along the way.”

Maxime:
For me, Louis is at the center of the project, therefore I had fewer interactions with the others, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem. I think that the music fits in very well with the drawings and I think Louis gave good indications. I didn’t get the sounds much in advance, so I can’t say that the sounds have influenced my way of drawing, and I don’t know to what extent Yovan was influenced by the drawings that I sent to the group.

Yovan:
With Maxime’s drawings, at some point in the performance there is question of velocity, there was a bicycle ride. I looked at Maxime’s images and said: “There, it would be good if we could create an electro night ambiance, where the sound system gradually builds up: at the beginning there is the kick drum and the bass, and then little by little things are added. I saw in these images something of this kind, and it influenced me to propose this idea.

Maxime:
I think that certain drawings imply that the music is very present at certain characteristic moments: at some point, the story takes place in the clouds, it was quite clear what you had to represent for the audience. So, I drew clouds and lightning, and Yovan made sounds of lightning and after that, he added a melody, I did it in my graphic manner and he did it with sounds and we ended up at the same place. Then, there is a walk in the forest, and it’s the same thing: I can see what I have to draw as a forest, and he can see also what we expect from a forest. The question that we both have to answer is the same, and we come up with a result that’s more or less in good synchrony.

Yovan:
I try to introduce musical elements, samples, or songs: at one point there’s a Greek song, at another one there is a kind of Chinese cithara, for each segment of music I try to think this way, mixing acoustic instruments with electronics. It’s fairly free anyway, my basic premise quickly turned into something else, as I really think in terms of sound illustration of what Delphine is saying. When she presents a specific universe, I try to stick to it, as in theatre or film music, to illustrate the storytelling. The music shouldn’t in this case take over, and at the same time you can have moments of music without narration, so that you feel like: “Well, here we have a moment when you can listen to the music with drawings, that’s nice”, something like that. It’s a question really of not just considering the coherence of using a scale or a concept, but of saying to yourself: “Well, we have to find a balance between these different moments of narration and music.”

Maxime:
I had very few direct exchanges with Yovan, we didn’t need to. I could call him, no worries, but we didn’t need to do it. While with Delphine, there were more exchanges.

Yovan:
Basically, I’ve got my frame, a Cubase session. I have the impression that somehow it’s my performance frame. I write down the performance frame on paper, it’s really like a setlist, it’s written in big letters to be able to see it on stage. It’s written on a discreet piece of paper, I’ve got all the main features in this setlist. It’s an automatization of events, but the problem is that each time we change location, sometimes we are in 7.1 and sometimes in 4.1, I have to change things. With my automations, you’ll have, for example, the sound in the middle, here you’ll be on the far right, there at the middle, at the left middle side, there on the far left, and so on. With the rain for example, there are other noise effects, I put them on the left… All this introduction, here [he plays a short extract], I double it on Sequential OB-6 (an analogue synthesizer), because once it’s in the loudspeakers, it lacks analog presence. There are things that I only do on the keyboard, where you have only noise effects [he plays another extract]. I touch the diverse keys to trigger different segments or sound effects, it’s really a mess, I know more or less how to find my way around: I am going there, then I know that I have to go down to trigger the noise effects..

28. The Tale and Drawings, Delphine, Maxime and Louis

Scene 1: Delphine, Louis and Maxime.

Delphine, 2023, May 4th (photo Valentin Bisschop).

Scene 2: Delphine and Maxime. During a residency.

Projection, 2023, May 4th (photo AADN).

Scene 3: Delphine and Maxime

Maxime:
My drawings are part of the background sets, they often support the narrative, but often the narration and the drawings don’t say the same thing. So, Delphine will spend a lot of time describing the actions that are going to happen and finally, she will not need to describe the sets since it would be redundant. So, when you arrive at an amphitheater, she will say “Here we are, we are in an amphitheater.” But finally, it didn’t really constrain me in what I should draw. And then, since the amphitheater appears, people see it, and she does not need to describe it precisely anymore, she will immediately tell what’s happening in this amphitheater. Because we also chose not to visually represent the heroine of the spectacle and to represent only very few characters, except when it was visually pretty strong or if it helped to take away certain ambiguities. At the beginning, we almost wanted to have none of the characters represented, but we realize that it was too strict a rule, that there was no reason to be so hard on ourselves in imposing it, and that wasn’t that important, you could have drawings of characters. So really, Delphine and I, we work side by side, and the result is an amplification that adds without ever lowering the quality, we are in our own rails without impeding each other.
 
For example, at some point a giant woman appears, so I made a giant drawing. It’s visually quite beautiful because when we’re under a dome, I can really make a very tall character. And it works very well because in this case, the storyteller ends up personifying the heroine who is small. I like this ambiguity, I don’t know to what extent it was basically intended, as the storyteller is supposed to be the narrator. But inevitably there are times when I think that the public perceives her as the main character, as she sometimes speaks on behalf of the heroine. I think that’s also the role of a storyteller: personifying all the characters and being at the same time the narrator. The fact that there are not many characters, the fact of not representing the main character, creates a situation where the audience doesn’t know whether the storyteller is the main character or the narrator, when in fact she is both at the same time, playing with this ambiguity. I don’t know to what extent it’s assumed by Louis, but it’s fine with me.
 
We discussed the idea whether or not we should show the characters. We tested the giant figure with the audience, and we got good feedback. At one point we removed it, and we thought it was less effective, we liked it when she appeared.

29. Sonorization

Yovan:
Usually, we play with a sound engineer, and we work on this aspect of sonorization. In Nantes, for example, we had an excellent sound engineer, the balance was made over one week, we worked every day on it. When in certain residencies, we are told at the last minute, “you may use this space, but there is no sound engineer.” Delphine can be tense because we are running out of time before the premiere, then the sound is not very good. The balance between Delphine’s voice and the music is essential; if it’s not right, it can bring prejudice to the performance. So, we worked a lot on that.

Delphine:
Before the Tale of the Common Future, my voice had never been amplified. The guitarist I performed with had an acoustic guitar. Amplification has a very odd and surprising effect on me, and it changed my relationship with the public: I can speak very softly, I can whisper, it depends also on the quality of the amplification, which was very good when we had a good sound engineer, and very bad at other times.

Yovan :
The problem is that every time we change space and equipment, and we don’t have a sound engineer attached to the group who knows in two minutes what to do, we have to adapt. But when there is a good sound engineer, I have been helped a lot, particularly in learning to use Dante for mixing in 7.1, it’s a digital sound card, which is generally integrated on the mixing boards of the sound engineers nowadays, and which means you don’t need to have a sound card in your computer, but you can go through an ethernet wire, and have your balance done directly according to the place. With Dante, you can communicate with the mixing board. So, I come with my 7.1 configuration, and I just trigger it, and if I come to a new place which has also Dante but is in 4, because there are only 4 loudspeakers, then, I just have to change my configuration, I don’t even need to do a balance. So, it’s very useful, but in all the residencies, we had this system only twice, unfortunately, there are lot of places that don’t have Dante. I have my digital sound card installed in my computer in order to be able to do the balance when they don’t have Dante. In any case, every time, you have to pull your hair out for at least one day of technical sound preparation, and also the night, before you can start working on the spectacle.

Delphine :
It can be a real pain if the amplification is not good, because I think that there’s something intimate about this spectacle. If my microphone works well, I don’t need to speak loudly, which is for me an effort because I tend to have a lot of energy.

Louis:
She isn’t yet used to speaking in a microphone, it’s often a technical problem of audio return, she doesn’t hear herself well, it’s a problem of sonorization, she has to hear herself as well as the audience does. Clearly, it’s not exactly the same situation as in tradition of storytelling. If people from the tale-telling world come to see the performance, they might think it’s not a tale at all, because in a tale you never show any images, there’s rarely any music, and generally it’s one person alone telling a story to a public. There is no distancing between the storyteller and the audience, so, the microphone creates a distance, but it’s not the same situation. I think that there’s a certain distance that takes place, but it operates in two ways: on the one hand, when she tells the story, she distances herself from the public, on the other hand, after that, she comes back very strongly towards them when she comes to ask them questions.

Yovan:
With each residency you have to adapt your system, with electronics there’s always issues. Often, you don’t know why, only two loudspeakers worked out of four, then finally we have them, OK. You have to take care of the image and the sound. When there’s no sound engineer and there are all these noise effects that usually go through 8 loudspeakers, but suddenly you have only four of them, it’s not the same settings. So, I have three configurations, I have 5 points, 4 points and 7 points, and each time I have to readjust. With respect to noise effects, there are two or three pieces where I made what we call Stems, [30] that is I separated the bass from the drums, the chords, and the voices, to mix them a little together. You can have the bass located here, and the drum set there, to make it more immersive. In fact, it didn’t like it on all the pieces, because sometimes it was not easy to understand, I preferred having a source coming out in stereo, with the noise effects behind, otherwise I thought it was too scattered. It’s the sound engineer who initiated me to Dante who knew all about that. He tried to remix my pieces, I sent him the Stems of my pieces.

Delphine:
When we played the piece in Paris, Marie-France Marbach came to see me at the end and said: “Listen, you have to get some voice training, you can’t go on like this.” Since then, I’ve been doing a training course in Lyon with a lady, Mireille Antoine, qui est extra. Une dame avec un charisme incroyable et en même temps une grande humilité. Ellwho is extra. A lady with incredible charisma and at the same time a great humility. She makes me work on my voice which tends to be too forceful. The voice is actually a very intimate thing, so she immediately sees a bit of what I told you before about myself. She says to me: “Well, you do everything forcefully, you’re a warrior, you’ve built everything up, your identity is your strength, you’ve put in so much support, you’ve put up a shield, to make sure that you’ll never be vulnerable again. So, we will have to break down the walls, so that your voice comes from the belly so as not to block emotion.” Because you your own emotions are not what matter, it’s the audience that you want to get carried away. And it’s also dangerous for me to give it all, I’m hurting myself. And it might be unpleasant for the audience too because it’s not on them to carry this burden. So, it takes some work to place your voice and also to put some distance from what you’re saying, to let the voice resonate and not to get carried away. It’s an intense work, but very interesting.

Yovan:
For example, once, a sound engineer said to Delphine: “You’re speaking far too loud in your mike, you don’t need to do that.” She is used to speaking acoustically, so, he turned her mike down and she was more careful. When she is stressed, she tends to speak louder, and then, sometimes the music is too loud in relation to the voice, that’s something I can control. In Nantes, everything went well, we had a good rhythm, a full week to rehearse each scene, so, we found a balance that worked better. Sometimes you realize that in such and such place you are less at ease, that’s the nature of live performance. That’s the way it is.

Delphine:
I tend to speak loudly, so I really have to make an effort to keeping my voice down. It’s true that with the presence of a sound engineer, you give up part of the responsibility, in the sense that if my voice sounds through amplification like a carpet dealer, it might quickly be perceived as someone selling detergents on the market. In this case, there is nothing I can do about it, no matter how softly I speak, or try to put more music in my voice, this type of sound will remain. If the sound is rotten, however you may try to “na na na,” nothing can be done.

30. Communication with Notion [31]

Maxime:
We use Notion, a software that shares things between several participants. For example, Louis tells me: “Well, there, with Delphine, we have written a text. She has to clean up a text and she puts it on Notion, that’s the link.” So, I click on it, and I see that, effectively, she’s updated it a day before and that’s the last version of the text. If a week later I have to take up the text, it’s possible that she’s changed it. In this way, I have the updated version, it allows me to be always working on the last version.

Delphine:
With Louis, the good thing is that we communicate with Notion software, I can write on it, and he can have immediate access to it. Sometimes when I have questions, I write and then call him, saying: “Look at what I have done. What do you think of it?”

Yovan:
Louis uses Notion to communicate a series of resources, texts that inspired me, particularly about biocracy. We talked about that together. You have to ask Louis about biocracy because it’s a concept that inspired him a lot, especially concerning the major lawsuits included in the piece, that allow nature, a river, a tree, to have the same rights as human beings and therefore to be able to sue a company like Total. This concept is interesting and corresponds well to the Tale idea of human beings reconnecting with nature. He put lots of resources on this on Notion.

Maxime:
I have all my drawings on computer, and I share them with Louis on Dropbox. That way I know if Louis likes them – because I don’t necessarily know that – but there is a little notification to that effect. When I’ve put up a new drawing, I call him, I am proud of myself.

Scene 1: Maxime and Louis.

Maxime:
And then, in the way we work, it’s true that Louis and I, we like participatory tools, participatory software, so he made some sorts of to-do list that we can both consult, each of us saying to ourselves: “Ah! I’ll mark this, so he will see that I’ve done it”. I think that these tools improve things significantly. Then, I still like the informal chat over the telephone, to talk about this and that, where we can go much further into things. I think there are elements of messages that are important, mostly when I send drawings in progress in order to have feedback before I finish them. Messages are very useful when they tell me what direction to take or give me the chance to diverge from common meaning. I would rather use the chat like that to balance my contents and to confirm the feedback if everything goes well. What’s more, when we are more in the prospective phases, with Louis, we usually go to see or call each other. I think that when we don’t know something, it’s not enough to be on WhatsApp, on a chat group to make a project. That means seeing each other at certain times. On the other hand, there’s a huge amount of working time that’s done on one’s own. So, it’s very much a hybrid thing, there are important points for discussions, and then, there are all the individual times.

Yovan:
In fact, I’ve found that, in the groups I play with, they often say: “Well, we’re not on Messenger, we’re not on WhatsApp, we’re on Signal, it’s better”. So, I receive a lot of links, and they tell me: “It’s true, we don’t go on that sort of stuff anymore.” Notion is interesting, yes, Louis likes all these ways of communication, I haven’t been on it that much, but that’s the place where we send each other things and where you can see what has been changed. I think there are plenty of interesting resources, but for me it’s a question of time. If there’d been a year with less things to do, I would have had more time to go on it. And then, since we’re already talking about it, and I just need few elements to write the music, I just have to think about it.

Maxime:
In terms of software, it’s really only Notion, WhatsApp and then, Dropbox. And concerning the forms of discussion, it’s really going to be either the WhatsApp group, or me calling Louis or sometimes Delphine for the tale, but less so because it’s mainly Louis who is in contact with her. It’s really Louis who is mastering the flow of things with everyone. So, when we call him, he can pass on the information, he is mostly at the center and things revolve around him. That’s why we call him “the creator” who kind of pilots everything. He doesn’t write, there is no visible content, even though he creates the content and sets my drawings in motion.

31. Residencies: LabLab, Chevagny, Vaulx-en-Velin, Enghien-les-Bains.

Louis:
I plan the residencies down practically to the minute: this morning we talk about that, then everybody introduces themselves, then we take a break, we go for a walk together, then we come back, then we work on the beginning of the tale, etc. This I do for practically all the residencies, what’s going to happen hour by hour. And this was very useful to us many times when you find yourself lost in things, you are in the thick of things, you are doing things, and suddenly you’ve got a blank page, you don’t know what to say or what to do anymore. So, you tell yourself: “Ah! well, we’d planned a walk in the forest,” hop, well forest walk it is, then. I had ideas like that: the fact of walking in the forest, since at the beginning of the story, it takes place in a forest, I wanted to take them up in the trees, do some acrobranching and sleep in the trees, but I never did it. Here, I found one of these schedules:

10h-11h am : Presentation of our universe.
11h-noon: Presentation of the project.
Noon-1h30 pm: Lunch.
1h30-3h: Free exploration of tomorrow’s world, where are we going?
3h-5h: And above all with whom?
5h-5:30h: The day in review, what are we going to do tomorrow?
If we don’t know what to do: tomorrow, touring the village, to talk together.

Let’s talk now about the writing residencies, I call them “emerging residencies.” First, on January 6 and 7, 2022. Then we met again on May 5 and 6, 2022. We did a music residency with Yovan and me on January 27, 2022, that finished with a Visio-conference with the four of us. Then we did an “unfolding the tale” on June 23 and 24, 2022 with everybody.

Then, we had the “unfolding the tale” residency on June 23 and 24, 2022. This residency was again at the LabLab in Lyon. We used this place a lot. All four were present. Here is the pre-established schedule:

10h. am: Presentation of the state of progress of the narrative plot and feedback; presentation of music and feedback, presentation of drawings and feedback, presentation of Live Drawing and feedback.
11h30: Identifying contact zones between music and drawings, between storytelling and public participation.
Noon: Lunch.
1h pm: Installation, set-up drawing projections and music.
1:30h: First scene.
3:30h: Second scene.
4:30h: Pause.
5h: Third scene.

It was a bit ambitious, I don’t know if we were successful in fulfilling this schedule. After that, 6:30 pm, it’s the end. And then comes Friday:

9h. am: Feedback on Day 1.
10h.: Scene 0, which was the welcoming of the public, we gave a lot of thinking to how we were going to welcome the audience, because that was really part of the immersion and to showing how to use the tools, to explain how it was going to happen.
11h.: Go-through scenes 1, 2, and 3.
1h. pm: Public presentation.

At the end of the residency, we’d do a small public presentation, and then after some feedback, we were supposed to work a little more before everyone would leave. Except that we didn’t do anything after the performance, we were exhausted. So, I thought that we should never work anymore after a performance.

In August 2022, we did our first real residency, where at the end the totality of the Tale was going to be presented. It was part of the festival « Chevagny Passions » [32], thanks to Antipode and Chevagny-Passions. For the first time we were paid. We spent one day with Antipode, and at the beginning, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I worked with Delphine only, and Friday Yovan arrived, and we worked all three together. And we played Saturday once, and twice Sunday. And we managed to produce a performance with over 20 minutes of the piece. We get super positive feedback from the audience, for each of the three performances we perform in front of about 60 to 80 people.

Maxime:
We did a first residency without a dome at Chevagny-sur-Guye, during which we had tested the idea of having drawings with a storyteller, with sound, and with an audience that had reacted quite favorably to the participation tool. Finally, there are the four of us, plus the participatory tool that brings the public into the story

Louis:
The performances took place in the church, I recuperated our video projector that we have with Live Drawing, which enabled us to cover the totality of the back wall of the church. All the church’s benches were taken out, and replaced by reclining chairs, poufs, carpets. We were highly welcome.
 
The planning helps me because it makes me feel more secure. Let’s just say that it allows me not to get lost, and since after all I am the leader of a team, it’s better not to have any blanks. I know that I shouldn’t come and just say: “Ah! well, I don’t know what we are going to do.” I know that it would destabilize them, it wouldn’t please them.
 
It works, and we’re happy, and it’s just one month before the Vaux-en-Velin Planetarium residency, for which we have two weeks of work to do. The aim was to produce a 30-minute performance up to the scene with the “Great Council.” It was the first time that the visuals were adapted for a dome, and that took an enormous amount of time. The music was adapted for sound spatialization and we moved on with the storyline by finishing the “hunt for lightnings”, creating “the city” and “the Great Council”. Also, we discussed the budget and the planning of the pedagogical interventions that we decided to implement.

Maxime:
Each time we have to adapt to a place, because if you change the performance space, you change the screen size, so it’s possible that certain drawings will get a bit squashed or an element of the drawing gets too magnified, or is too far to the side. Sometimes, when under a dome, you can see images behind you. Sometimes the public is all facing the same direction, that’s fine, but at other times people are all facing the center of the space. For example, at one point, people have to look at two pathways and have to decide if you should take the path to the right or the one to the left. But as people are facing each other, in fact, for some people the path on the right is the one on the left, or such nonsense. Fortunately, a stage manager of a space had warned us, he was in Paris and told us: “Be careful, this image will not work.” So, I made a white arrow on the right-side panel, and a black arrow on the left-side panel, and then, we could say: “OK, you take the black arrow, or you take the white one.” So, there are lots of things like that which can vary.

Louis:
The next residency was 10 days at the Enghien-les-Bains “Centre des arts”.

Maxime:
The time spent in residency is super because it’s when you really discover what the others have been doing. Yovan rarely sent us the sounds he had prepared in advance, so I discovered them during the residencies. I bring most of my drawings, and I might take a tracing paper to redraw an element that’ll then be superimposed to the drawing. I come to the residency with my pencils in case something happens. I use Photoshop software to edit images in most cases, but sometimes I am obliged to do it by hand. When I show a drawing, there is generally not much feedback, everyone seems happy with it. But Delphine said to me once:

Delphine:
Yes, your drawing is fine, but in fact, it lacks flowers. You are a bit sad here, you should add some flowers.

Maxime:
OK, you’re right, I am with you, it doesn’t suit me but… you’re right, I’m going to add flowers.
 
So, I drew lots of flowers so as to be able to take them one by one and afterwards integrate them into the drawing. And it’s better, a lot better, however it took me a while but… Now that we are almost at the end of it, I’ve got a list of alterations like that to be done on different drawings, where I need to add flowers, to remove some trees, that sort of thing.
 
Once the performance starts, I haven’t got much to do, because my drawings are already done, it’s Louis who is in charge of the animation. So roughly speaking, I’m in charge of the public participation part (people who are going to draw and all that), but I can also take care of the lighting. We did run through the piece together, someone helped me, she said: “You see, there, you turn it on, there you turn it off.” It had to make sense in terms of the story and so the storyteller was sometimes in the foreground, because she should be enhanced in front of the drawings; at other times, on the contrary, you have to turn her off so that the drawings can really take over all the viewer’s attention. That’s an interesting aspect that I discovered, I think it enriches the performance to be able to increase or decrease the presence of the storyteller.

Children looking at Maxime’s drawings, 2023, June 18th, CDA d’Enghien-Les-Bains (photo Nicolas Sidoroff).

32. Public Participation

Louis:
Then there was of the interaction with the audience that was important, how to use what already exists, what you’ve already mastered, in order to have the public participate. And so, it was basic, it wasn’t just for them to do things like creating the set, but to really pass on ideas through drawing. In the Live Drawing, you ask people questions, so as to provide them with subject matters for drawing, and then they do it. And in fact, we’ve found that to get people to start drawing, you have to be very simple, then afterwards, you can go super far, and they follow you, and produce incredible things. When I was in the process of creating the “Tale”, I always thought that the Live Drawing events could help me to find ways of involving the public in the tale, for example by proposing drawing themes such as: how do you see the transport of the future, how do you see things?

Maxime:
There is the question of the wall that exists between the scene and the public and how we can try to partially break it. In our case, I have the impression that the wall does not exist, but I realize that a small filter remains, a transparency paper, something in between, anyway there is a screen. When we started to experiment with digital applications, we saw a lot of things that depended on a single remote control, you had queues of 50 people waiting to access the technological tool. We thought Live Drawing was a good idea because this time it was really participatory, it was everyone doing things at the same time. So, on the one hand, we still had a thin wall, since we used telephones, but at least the thing was accessible to all. We pushed that idea because that’s what the festivals expected of us. They told us: “What we liked about it is the fact that everyone is doing things at the same time, last year we had 50 people waiting to access things, it was very frustrating for everybody.” So, we thought: “Ah! Banco!” There is still a limit because it’s anonymous: the people draw, and they can sit on a sofa, drawing in their own corner, or drawing eventually for the screen on the wall in Live Drawing, making drawings that aren’t interesting, that we feel obliged to delete without knowing who did it. By and large, that way, we break the wall since everyone is proactive in the work, and at the same time there’s still a bit of a filter in the sense that people are anonymous, and so, not completely assuming responsibility for their acts. And at the same time, that’s what freed them too, as I said to them: “Let’s go, in any case if you are going to do a rotten drawing, no one will know that’s you who did it, you’ll not have to show it to your son next to you, he won’t know, and at least you’ll have tried.”

Louis:
Concerning public participation and Live Drawing, I went back and forth with Maxime Touroute and Rémi Dupanloup. In the meantime, we did another project called “La Bulle du personnel” (the staff bubble), which was an institutional project for a hospital where we wanted to make a wall of interactive postcards. So, we spent a lot of time working on that idea of postcard. Maxime and Rémi who developed this project, used Live Drawing, and added new elements within it, in particular the possibility of inserting a text. So, I thought: “Yes, it would be very interesting if people could write instead of just using the Live Drawing.” I have adapted my desires for public participation according to the tools available to me. I couldn’t change, starting from scrap, because I had too many constraints, but all the same, I succeeded in getting people to write texts on basic things, notably on the big laws of the future.

Delphine:
I don’t feel far removed from the people in the audience because, after all, I ask them their advice. I feel the presence of the public, I know who is there. Because we help them to connect, we ask them if they are comfortably seated. Then, when I ask them their advice whether we should take the path on the right or the one on the left, I often take the time to say: “Do you all agree? Anyone disagree?” With almost no visible effort, I want to weave this relationship.

Louis:
The aim of this project isn’t necessarily centered on getting the public participating as such, but on projecting them into a desirable future and getting them to reflect on it. And to get them thinking about it, I propose they participate during the performance to engage them in this process. To achieve this, I use a system of gradually increasing participation:

a) Before the beginning of the performance, they draw stars on their smartphone to introduce them to the situation.
b) Then, they see their own stars appear on the wall, so they understand that what they’re doing with their phone is going to play a role in the story.

Tale’s beginning, 2023, May 4th (photo Valentin Bisschop).

c) Next, I have them draw the rain, it’s the same principle, but here they see that their image is animated and interacting with the plot.
d) And then, they choose a pathway, so now, they are really participating by saying yes or no, a simple choice that will determine the evolution of the story.
e) And after that, we ask them questions live, for example saying to them: “Here we are, in the world of the future, what do we do about people who don’t respect the rules?” Here you’re already starting to have a more in-depth interaction, and above all, this will make them think about potential conflicts, like how to behave in the future regarding someone who doesn’t respect the rules, how it might happen in a desirable future (we make this clear again and again) especially when we are in presence of students who want to hang people.
f) Then, after the Great Council, they have to write the laws – this is what was closest to my heart and that’s what I try to preserve – we ask them to write a law that could today help us to achieve this desirable future.

Maxime:
With the “Tale of the Common Future”, we went a little further by asking people to participate in a real debate, by addressing the audience directly saying: “Here, what do we do, how should we continue the story, go ahead and propose something to us.” The time is quite structured in the sense that there is a period when the audience has to assimilate what the story is about, then there are open times where they’re on their anonymous telephones, and there is at least one period where we even turn the lights bock in the hall on to have a debate. This means that the separating wall between the scene and the public constantly goes up and down, there are several layers, but you can’t say that it’s completely removed.

Louis :
And I think that the Great Council, when we explain Biocracy, and when we get them involved, that’s really at the heart of what I wanted to do. In effect, we could do more, and we could do it differently, but in any case, I think that if they manage to think of a law within the framework of our present democratic society, in France, if you can imagine finding a law to make the world better, it means that you’re not going to have a violent revolution, but rather a more benevolent revolution. That’s really something that motivates me, and I want to show people that the system has certainly its faults, but solutions can be found within this system allowing us to succeed in evolving in a positive manner.

Delphine:
Even if the smartphone is bait for teenagers, because when we say to the kids they’re going to be able to draw on their phone, they say: “Ah! Really?”, they want to go and see the performance. Amazing! But in fact, they don’t do much on it, they draw the rain. At the end of the Nantes performance, a lady came to me and told me: “Hey! It’s a bit like cheating, your use of the phones, it’s a bit like trying to catch young people, because nobody chooses anything in your story.” I said “yes,” because I wasn’t going to contradict her, she’d seen it all.

Maxime:
We have to be careful about how we communicate our spectacle, because if we over-sell the participatory side, rather than the storytelling, the audience might be disappointed. At the beginning we sold the spectacle a bit by saying: “It’s a video game, you are active in shaping the story” and all that. I don’t know, it seems that it’s not a video game, where people at any moment take a joystick and move things around. We thought we mustn’t advertise that idea too much, because the people might be disappointed, we’ll sell them something that’s not representing what we’re doing. When we start a creation, you have a lot of ambitions, and once you’ve created something, you need to realize that in spite of liking what you have done, it does not correspond to the original ambition. You need to rewrite it to match what you want to do. So, we’ve been working a lot on this participatory side of things, but now it’s more just one of the ingredients, rather than the founding element of the spectacle.

On the question of a possible contradiction in the relationships with the audience between the intimate nature of storytelling and the technologies used in the performance, what’s interesting is to really tackle the problem in reverse order. In the call for Immersive projects, a lot of applicants submitted things based on technologies, their lines of thought didn’t really leave the computer. The fact of introducing a tale meant bringing an archaic element into the extremely technological world of digital arts. We proposed something non-technological, and it’s the same for the drawings which are done by hand. So, it’s not so much that we’ve “digitalized” the tale and the drawings, but it’s more that we’ve made the digital arts more human. In any case, I wasn’t expecting that, but the people who supported us said: “That’s what we appreciated in your application, it’s the fact that you bring together universes that we didn’t think could cohabit.” It was Louis’ intuition to update the digital arts by showing that they can be applied in so many different ways. It’s true that in the “Tale of a Common Future,” we are in a tension, because we want to tell a story and at the same time, we want to get the audience participating. So, it’s a delicate balance to achieve, it’s super sensitive. There’s a balance where we could perhaps open up the public participation more, and at the same time, once we have decided to have a story, you necessarily go more or less from point A to point B, where in any case you don’t have 10,000 entries. It closes a bit the question of participation.

33. The Artistic and Cultural Education Residency at Hennebont.
Louis, Delphine and Maxime

Louis :
Another form of participation was experimented with the Hennebont (Brittany) residency in schools, it was a EAC, “Education Artistique et Culturelle – Affaires Culturelles” (Artistic and Cultural Education – Cultural Affairs), [33] which lasted ten days in primary and secondary schools. We both worked almost eight hours a day during this period in many different classes. Public participation took another form of temporality: with the “Tale of the Common Future,” the public is only present for an hour, so it’s clear that people potentially will have less time to reflect than the primary and secondary school students, who work with this artistic project during one year, who are also supervised by the teachers who speak about it before I arrive. It means that when it’s well done, as in Hennebont, when our arrival. If it’s well done, as in Hennebont, they will have spent already four months of classes to reflect on the subject in different courses, in any case in visual arts. For four months they think about it, and then, I add another layer. I ask the students: “What would you like in the future concerning your habitat, what would you like as transportation, as the means of moving about?” Then I tell them, “We’ve thought about that,” and I show some elements of the Tale of the future, saying: “Well, we thought that it should be like this or that, but you, how do you see it?” And in general, it obviously raises their thinking, because you show something upon which they can reflect. The two situations of participation, performing in front of an audience and teaching in school, are just as important to me. Maybe the students in school think about it more, but it’s really a question of timing.

Delphine:
We did that residency in Hennebont with primary and secondary schools, they’d been drawing things that were then projected during the performance. To link all this to our spectacle, I briefly summarize the story of the performance we’re going to present them. In any case, at the beginning, there’s a general presentation by Louis and me.

Scene 1: Delphine and Louis. Presentation for the students.

Delphine:
After that, both of us, we decide, depending on the situations and on the classes, our line, our objective, what we expect from them to do at the end of the day: do we want them to tell a story, or to produce something?

Louis:
With the SES classes (Economic and Social Sciences classes) I worked on the organization modes for future collective decision making, what economic models, what types of commercial and diplomatic exchanges between communities, what types of work and employment. In all my interventions, I speak of how people will live, in what kind of habitat in the future (especially with the youngest students), how they’ll get around, how they’ll be transported from one place to another. I am interested in Artificial Intelligence, so I spoke quite a bit about images generated by AI, which wasn’t really related to the Tale project, but which gave me a kick at that moment.

Delphine:
With one of the classes, we produced court cases. They were in small groups, they could use their phone, not to go where they usually go, but to go to research tools looking for court cases. So, you needed a victim, a culprit, and a trial, a cause. There some very well dressed were girls who came for the case to sue Zara, H&M and ASOS, great! I said to them: “You can tell all your friends”. They found out (and I learned that from them) that it was the Uighurs in China who make all these fashion clothes in extreme poverty, and everybody here buys them. “Me, you see, I buy clothes on Vinted and there’s loads of clothes to buy, amazing! [Muttered:] In fact everyone buys their clothes there. [Normal voice:] It’s very cheap”. So, they’ve discovered that, and I think it’s great that kids in small groups search on their phones, because it’s a tool they have at all times. All of them have a phone, when we say: “Take your phone out”, not one of them says: “But I don’t have a phone.” They never went to search this kind of things on their phones, they are just on social networks, they are not going to use it for anything else.

Louis:
At certain moments we would be together, Delphine and me, in front of a class, but most of the time we were alone. We had very short interventions, the longest ones lasted three hours. I was going back and forth: I stayed for a week and went back to Lyon, six hours by train, then I went back there for two days during which we did five performances, a crazy marathon. Yovan joined us at that point. During these performances, I included all the drawings the students had made.

Delphine:
Artistic education is very interesting to me. With the primary school children, all I did was to tell them stories, because that’s what they wanted. I tried to take the basic features of the spectacle. They did also some drawings, they love drawings. In fact, they are not told stories very often. I started by asking them: “If you had to make big court cases for making a better world tomorrow, what would they be? What can you imagine?”

Louis:
The students had essentially to draw things. The teachers had worked very hard on the whole thing, on the avatars of the future, their habitat, they already started to describe their huts, their things, etc. So, the students drew their habitat of the future, their characters of the future, etc., and I integrated them into Maxime’s drawings. This was an enormous amount of work! I’ll never do that again! It took me ten hours of clipping, I don’t know how many thousands of drawings, it was unbearable. Well, “unbearable,” it wasn’t unbearable, but it really exhausted me. Afterwards, it enabled me to recalibrate my interventions, by saying to myself: “Ah! only one drawing per class!”.

Delphine:
So, we had this whole discussion about the death penalty, it was terrible! They were all for the death penalty. It’s complicated, isn’t it! So, we spent a whole session discussing that. Nowadays, you don’t talk about the death penalty any more at school, the teachers told me that they didn’t do that anymore. Me, at school, I got a lot of flak about the death penalty. We talked a lot about it, we read texts, “na-na-na-na-na-na”, Victor Hugo, “ta-ta-ti ta-ta-ta”. Now, you don’t talk about the death penalty, so the kids listen to television programs.

Scene 2: in the classroom with Delphine.

Delphine:
At the same time, the teachers afterwards told me that it was actually good to talk about it, because it’s something they keep to themselves. They don’t say anything to anyone, they’re sure of themselves, they’re certain of their little conceptions. So, as a result of discussing it, it gets things moving. It is difficult to tackle this, because you must not judge what they say either, it’s an open forum, a space where you are free to speak. And so, there are some gems in what is said, like: “No, but they should stop at the iPhone X, and after that they should stop making them.” I said: “Yes, OK!”
 
The fact that I didn’t like high school, that I was on the margins, means that I don’t have any a priori ideas about the students. It’s almost those at the margin that sometimes I find the most interesting. Because I don’t have a great self-esteem, I don’t have prejudgments as sometimes intellectuals do with respect to the ones who can’t make it. And I want to keep it that way. What I got from the circus, is the position of the body: first of all, we have to sit down, to put our feet down on the floor, we all have the backs straight and we are there all together. We’re not like that [she shows a slumped body position], if anyone really wants to stay like that, no big deal. But I mean, we are here, present with our body, and then there’s the work on breathing, on keeping straight, of sending what you want to say where you want to say it – [whispered] because if you talk like that, no-one understands anything – [normal voice] and this is also useful for them at school when they have their oral exam, they’ll know how to speak. There is a discussion, at first you just say their first name, and then ask if any of them are very embarrassed to speak in public. Because some are hyper embarrassed to speak. And then there are those who aren’t at all embarrassed, they should not be allowed to talk all the time, and have the others saying nothing, you have to manage that aspect, and then set some rules. From the onset, I set rules: don’t make fun of anyone here, you have the right to say whatever you wish, it will not go out of the classroom, it will stay between us. You can discuss things, but you are not there to say anything out of the blue, it’s a space of freedom, you respect others, no mockery, I can’t bear it. It was the circus that brought me this attitude that involves a lot of bodywork, and also, storytelling where working the body is related to speaking. And then I tell them stories and ask them what they think. Obviously, I’m not going to tell the same stories to teenagers as to primary school children.
 
We worked with the partners, the teachers. For example, we worked with a Spanish teacher. We had the students in a circle, and we looked for words in Spanish to imagine for example the Propel Stretch. So, I explained to them what it was, and then they started looking for words in the dictionary, they had a ball. I don’t know any Spanish, so they tried to pronounce things and then I would say: “How do you say that? This one I don’t know.” The kids were trying to say it. And the teacher said to me: “The Spanish classes have never been as beneficial as they were today.” Because it was another way to do it, they had to look for a vocabulary for future habitats in Spanish. Everything is possible, in fact.

Maxime:
There was a residency at Hennebont with high school students, I wasn’t there, so I think that must have had an influence on the writing, because Louis came back and told me: “They came up with some incredible ideas, it gave us many leads.” So, it may have orientated the story a little bit, but also, they made a lot of drawings. And this didn’t match up with my practice, because you have to remember that drawing is a solitary practice, that is done prior to being able to work with others. I don’t think that musicians are as solitary because there are the rehearsal times for rehearsals; it’s true, there’s personal time for practicing, but I think that the something collective happens more often. I work on my own before bringing new building blocks to the collective team.

34. The Residencies (continued): Paris, Nantes.

Louis:
The next residency was in Paris, at the Cité des Sciences. It was a five-day residency, and I only made a plan for the first day:

9h.am: Installation
10h.: Internet test
11h.: Video test
Noon: Lighting test
1h. pm: Lunch
…

Oh! yes, then there was Emilie Baillard, who is a stage director; I asked her to take an external look at Delphine’s movements on stage. She came and, in the end, we realized that a complete residency would have been necessary, and she was only there only for one day with us, while we were doing many other things. In Paris we added roughly between three and four minutes more.

Scene 1: Delphine and Louis

Louis:
In Nantes, Yovan, Delphine and I are present all the time. And there, the days weren’t very precisely organized, although as usual I’d drawn up a more or less complete schedule. And there we effectively run through the entire tale from beginning to end, because we arrived at the end of it. The two last days we have two public presentations, on Thursday evening and Friday evening, presenting the spectacle in its entirety even if we still are missing some drawings, even if Delphine reads her text. Maybe I didn’t mention this up to now – I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say it now – but what needs emphasizing is the enormous amount of work Delphine has done. In Nantes, the work days didn’t end at 6 p.m., they ended much later in the evening. Many times, Delphine and Yovan are both working together while I’m struggling with the drawings, so, I don’t have time to do things with them. What’s really great about Yovan, as a musician, is that he’s got a sense of rhythm, so he can say to Delphine:

Yovan :
There, you see when I play this, you have to say that.

Louis:
He goes back-and-forth a lot with Delphine, a lot of times they have to coordinate their actions:

Yovan :
Ah! no, that’s it! Exactly!

Louis:
And so, they go through the piece together. During the rehearsals, I often work on drawings that have nothing to do with what they are doing. Often, I work alone, many times when I have to adjust things, it doesn’t work, I redo it, it doesn’t work, I redo it… it doesn’t work! After a while finally it does work.

Louis’ working station during the performance, residency (2023, May 3rd), show (2024, May 31st), (photos Nicolas Sidoroff).

Louis :
From time to time, I call Maxime. And I have also to take care of all the rest. I do the animation of the drawings, the video, all the public participation part, I fix each time what’s going to appear on the smartphones, what’s going to appear on the screen, all the changes it implies, because it continuously changes as it goes along, you have to change the questions addressed to the audience, you have to change the interface, etc. There are many things to change while it’s going on with Live Drawing that I now know very well. And I’m also in charge of lighting. That’s a lot of things to do, I’m in charge of the technical side, I have also to take care of Yovan’s sound when something doesn’t work. Well, he looks at things, he does things, but generally it’s me who gets my hands dirty.

Yovan:
Louis is also helping out, otherwise it wouldn’t work. Now we know that for such a performance, you need someone permanently in charge of these technical aspects of sound and music, basically it’s not too much to ask. In this project, there were lots of things to be learned at the same time, frankly, that’s what was interesting to me. Each time you say to yourself: “Ah! there, it didn’t work!”, there is that big challenge. It takes one day to fix things and then you get back to the rhythm of the performance. In fact, every time, you have to familiarize yourself with the place, once you are comfortable in that place, that you have your sound balance, everything will fly.

Louis:
And at the end I find myself alone to de-install, while Yovan repacked his gear, it’s for me to put things back in order, but I’m used to it, it’s the role of the stage manager at the beginning and at the end, after everyone’s gone.

Yovan:
We really worked together as a trio because the story was still being written as we went along, it wasn’t a situation like: “So, here we are, I’ve written this text, now deal with it.” At the beginning, I proceeded in this manner with Delphine’s text, by composing the music to it. This was a good way to go, but after a while it was necessary to meet. The residencies were the occasion to work together, especially in Nantes where the text wasn’t completely written yet. Delphine didn’t send me anything prior to that residency because Louis had some ideas, but they had to agree together on what was really going to happen. Louis isn’t a writer, he’s not an author, but he was responsible for the concept of the spectacle, and he needed Delphine to put the story into words. And since I had also not decided on the music, I said: “I prefer to compose along with you.” So, for the end of the piece, I worked with them when we were in Nantes, making the noise effects with them. And when they’d ask me: “Look, right here, it would be good to have a moment of music,” I knew quickly how to produce something that would be rewritten later at home. That way, we were able to get well acquainted with each other. Louis’ project was very ambitious from the start, because he had a lot of ideas that you had to sort out. Now that we know each other, we know what works effectively, and for a possible next project, we will know what not to do, it’ll save time.

Louis:
So, we’re super happy at the end of the Nantes residency, because we succeeded in putting something together, and we’re very happy with the public feedback.

Scene 2: after the performance in Nantes
Delphine, Louis, Amandine’s friend, someone from the public

35. Ecology, Delphine

Delphine:
Today, after all, I might be bourgeois in relation to what I was before, and maybe I’m not “all eco”. That’s clear. But I try to do what I can. It’s true, I think the very rich are on another level: it’s all about rocket competitions, huge boats, it’s everyday taking a plane. It stinks. I think that already you could do a little more, you could stop using the pesticides a little. You’d just do a bit, and that would be already quite a lot. I denounce Total during the performance. In Uganda and in Tanzania, it’s terrible, they screw everything up. Tanzania, it’s a paradise on earth, there are giraffes, elephants, “prrrrrroo, gray, grog, track, trock, pail.” Some people rebel, they are locked in the dark for six months. And Macron supports. And everyone supports that, BNP Paribas finances, come on but where’s the problem guys? It’s awful. It’s awful, but it’s going on. But there are people who denounce it, I learnt that from watching the television show “Investigation gizmo”: a blond girl, very short hair, doing Tintin investigations, I don’t know how to say that, is it written somewhere? [noises of page turning] In short, anyway, there’re are journalists who denounce the status quo, things are happening. I think things will change, at least I hope.
 
The problem is that the rich couldn’t care less. They want to continue to live in luxury and are so afraid of losing all their money. Why? It’s crazy. You’re not asking them to live on subsistence allowance, and go sweep the street pavements, as we’re asking the unemployed nowadays. Yeah, it’s true, I come from a very low-class background, I come from no-dough, maybe I have this empathy or this understanding of other people who don’t have that, because they were born into luxury and they don’t understand that if one day they don’t have that anymore, it still will be OK, it can be a beautiful life without all that. You almost want to give these people a hug: “It’s going to be all right, don’t worry!”
 
I’ve discovered some incredible architects, like Ferdinand Ludwig. We looked for examples of architecture, like vernacular architecture, it’s all premises that are built with trees and plants. I didn’t completely agree with this. Maxime and I talked a lot about it, because for me, if you make buildings with trees, they have to be rooted in the ground, and often with the buildings you see, the trees are in plant pots. As someone who loves trees and reads a lot, I know that trees communicate through their roots, so you miss it if you do that: they can’t communicate. The trees protect themselves from certain illnesses through the roots, by the mycelium, they send information if there are animals or insects attacking them. One tree communicates: “Quickly, protect yourself!” then, it dies, but not the ones next to it. So, I think it’s a pity to put them in pots. In any case, I think you will be obliged to put plants, vegetation in cities, otherwise too many people will die. It’s obvious.

Tale in the middle, 2023, May 4th (photo Valentin Bisschop).

36. Conclusion

Louis:
My team was formed by people who are actually good at what they do, otherwise I wouldn’t have worked with them. So, from there, if they propose something, I assume that it’s good, that they know better than I do what’s good, because that’s their job. It’s the same with Yovan, I don’t give him a hard time about the music, I am not going to tell him what to do… Oh! yes anyway, I do give him a bit of a hard time!

Yovan:
In this project, the people I work with had no strong requirements and trusted me, they let me be free to develop my own things. It allowed me to express myself and continue to evolve in that way. I could adapt the music to different situations, if it was too long or too short, I could decide what was working and what was not Then, sometimes, Louis and I didn’t agree, he would say: “Well, here I’d like to have more of that, you should play that live,” or things like that. But it was always expressed in order to find a common ground between us.

Louis:
I give them all a bit of a hard time, that’s kind of my role. I give my opinion, and then they follow my advice or not at all. Basically, I give the big directions. But overall, I leave them 100% free.

Final bow and thanks, 2023, May 4th (photo Valentin Bisschop).

Maxime:
When I’m drawing, I still have that idea of going a bit against my architectural practice (and its long-time established nature). There’s maybe one, two or three sketches in black and white, which take I’d say two minutes to do, and then, when I hold one, I do a color sketch in maybe five minutes, and then, in general, I rarely go back to do it again. As I know that I have limited time, I don’t allow myself to do too much research. Fairly quickly, I say to myself: “Now, I have got a lot of drawings to do, let’s get on with it” and I like this sense of being instinctive. Not much tergiversations but going instinctively.

Yovan:
What I retain from the collective work is that even the negative makes you learn things. It’s pulling your hair at certain moments, but it was interesting in any case to work in a planetarium and all that. I rarely visited these kind of places, you don’t go there every day, I’m speaking for myself, but it’s interesting to see that they are very well equipped for sound and music (also visually speaking). And as a result, there’s a lot to be done, especially with digital arts, which is actually a fairly new practice. I have a good number of friends who are getting into digital arts, there’s so much going on with that. The phenomenon goes beyond the performances of digital artists, it’s something that’s developing nowadays in concerts of electronic music, even in rock and rap concerts, you are into textures, lighting, etc. I learned that in order to put together a performance that might last fifteen minutes, it’s going to be a lot of work. On the other hand, I think that the ideal would have been to have a maximum of things already laid down before the first residency, particularly in the writing of the story, so that afterwards, once we’re in the creative stage, we could go into as much detail as possible in rehearsals and into trimming things. We had not enough time to do that in relation to what was not going well, so as to air out the spectacle. Well, this is going to be useful for next time, but it was full of discoveries, and at the same time, discoveries of what could be better, but you have that in all projects in any case. So, frankly, for the most part there’s some positive aspects in every sense, and now here’s the spectacle, and we are hoping that it will go a bit on tour, so that we can continue to fine-tune it.

Delphine :
These are wonderful encounters, I‘m happy to have met all three of them. It was cool to be with them, it’s a team that really functions well. It’s particularly nice to be with them, because it’s not always certain that you’ll be able to work with anyone, that’s true, it’s not always that simple. Here we all get on really well, even at the level of creative collaboration.
 
I’ve now read my notes, it makes me laugh, this is not at all what I would say today. It’s funny.

The “Tale of a Common Future” was premiered on June 18, 2023, at the Centre des Arts in Enghien-les-Bains near Paris.

TheTale for a Common Future chooses to collectively explore a desirable future and the ways to achieve it. This is a participatory spectacle, with the audience using their smartphones and voices to take part in the story in the manner of a video game. The story is constructed as a collective improvisation, in which each participant can at any moment make it deviate or fork, jostle it, increase it, divert it.

Co-production: AADN –Arts & Cultures Numériques (Digital Arts and Culture) in Lyon, Vaulx-en-Velin Planetarium, Paris Planetarium of the “Cité des sciences et de l’industrie”, Stereolux, Nantes Planetarium, association Antipodes, “Pays d’Art et d’Histoire” between Cluny and Tournus.

With the support from the “Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée” and SACEM.